


can't change the color of the sea at all

by disco_vendetta (brinn)



Series: your body as a tourist [2]
Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, F/M, Gen, M/M, Stanley Uris Has The Shining, the Losers go to Florida, weaponized pool noodles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-15
Updated: 2021-02-15
Packaged: 2021-03-17 07:27:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 30,295
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29467986
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brinn/pseuds/disco_vendetta
Summary: “Let’s go out for dinner tonight,” she says, later. “I don’t feel like cooking and I want to drink something out of a pineapple or a coconut or something.”“Bev. My man. My best dude. Yes,” Richie replies from where he’s floating a pool noodle. “Pineapple drink. Let’s do that.”“I saw a bar near the grocery store that has hermit crab racing,” Mike says over the top of his cozy mystery he borrowed from the front office.“Oh, hell yeah,” Richie says, sitting up so fast he overbalances on his noodle and tips face-first into the water. “This is my destiny,” he sputters, sunglasses sliding off his face, “I was born to be Florida Man.”After Derry, the Losers take Mike to Florida, Bev remembers exactly who she is.
Relationships: Ben Hanscom/Beverly Marsh, Bill Denbrough/Mike Hanlon, Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier, Patricia Blum Uris/Stanley Uris
Series: your body as a tourist [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2109819
Comments: 18
Kudos: 95





	can't change the color of the sea at all

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dudski](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dudski/gifts).



> no need to read the previous work in this series first
> 
> Standard clowntown warnings apply: mentions of suicide, mentions of domestic violence, medical trauma, Blanket Tom Rogan Warning.

_You want to know what it was like?_  
 _It was like my whole life had a fever._  
“Tim Riggins Speaks of Waterfalls,” Nico Alvarado 

  
They have to drive over a huge bridge, a mile long, to get to Sanibel Island, so high up that pelicans fly parallel to the car windows, and Bev twists in her seat so she can see Stan pressed against the window in the back, his easy smile making him look twelve years old again. 

Behind them, Bill taps on his horn arrhythmically, his face in the rearview contorted into a horrified Munch scream. 

“Is he…honking at me, or the pelicans?” Ben asks, giving the dashboard a quick perusal for warning lights. 

“The pelicans,” Stan says without looking away from the window. 

They’ve been playing musical cars for about five states now, taking turns driving, playing fast and loose with Richie and Ben’s rental insurance. Bill is tailgating Ben in Richie’s ridiculous convertible, clearly terrified of getting lost on a bridge with two lanes, while somewhere ahead of them Mike is driving his own car with Eddie in the passenger seat, last seen gesticulating wildly at the GPS. 

“So I’m not saying I hope Bill gets attacked by a pelican and drives off a bridge,” Richie starts.

“An auspicious beginning to any sentence,” Ben sighs. 

“I’m just _saying_ that I could do a lot with it, professionally,” Richie continues. 

“I thought you didn’t write your own material,” Bev throws over her shoulder and she can actually _hear_ Stan roll his eyes. 

“Well, not _lately, Beverly_ , but imagine what I could do with witnessing firsthand the _Attic Room_ guy get ethered by a pelican. That is the single most embarrassing bird to be murdered by.”

“Debatable,” Stan says murmurs, and the next fifteen minutes devolve into Richie attempting to pester Stan into listing Humorous Murder Birds in descending order with little success. 

The bridge turns into a one way single lane road with a speed limit of 25 and street names like _Sand Dollar_ and _Sea Grape_. The lanes are wide, with a median of lush greenery, hibiscus and birds of paradise growing like roadside scrub. Even Richie’s monologue fades into contented humming, the effect is so serene. 

“Alright, we’re looking for someplace called ‘The Sands,’” Ben says, squinting at a passing road sign. 

“You’ve never been here before?” Bev asks, conferring with the Google Maps on Ben’s new phone. 

“It’s actually an acquaintance’s timeshare they let me buy for a couple weeks. There wasn’t anything else available on the island—I guess they’re really strict about keeping it as private as possible.”

“Ooh, Haystack has an _acquaintance_ ,” Richie says, waggling his eyebrows like a pervy muppet. “Better watch your back, Bev, someone’s been makin’ moves on ya man.” 

Bev flips him off over the back of her carseat. 

“Yeah, did you notice there aren’t any Starbucks or McDonald’s or any other chains?” Stan says, rescuing Ben, who is turning progressively pinker with every second, visibly torn between his two great urges: defending people’s honor and never drawing attention to himself for any reason. 

She leans over and touches the side of Ben’s knee, very gently. She learned her lesson somewhere in Maryland when she had caught him quietly singing along to radio ( _“Jimmy quit, Jody got married, should’ve known we’d never get far”_ ) and had reached out, sleepy and fond, to squeeze his thigh and he had almost driven into the median. His eyes cut away from the road for a second to find hers, his small smile crinkling up his eyes. His shoulders stay up around his ears for another mile, though. 

Maybe Ben’s acquaintance really _was_ an _acquaintance_. Bev rolls that around in her mind a little, waiting for a spike of jealousy to flare up inside her. Instead she just finds relief, that Ben’s had someone, even if it wasn’t love, even if it wasn’t all the time. 

That relief, it sparks something else in her, some weird rushing sense of…anger, almost. Not at Ben, at…someone. Something. She can’t identify what she’s reacting to. The feeling doesn’t make sense, she doesn’t want it, and she crushes it down into a tight little ball in her chest and pushes it away. She rolls down the window and lets the warm air buffet her face, whipping her hair into a rat’s nest. 

The Sands, it turns out, is apparently a small complex of plain, stucco buildings on stilts, with parking underneath and beach towels drying on every balcony. 

Mike and Eddie are standing outside the main office, Mike looking beatific and Eddie mostly just looking sweaty. 

“How did you beat us here?” Ben asks, climbing out of the driver’s seat, his shirt sticking to his skin where it was touching the car seat. 

“I had a good navigator,” Mike says, smiling at Eddie, who is watching a tiny lizard run by with mounting horror. 

Before they can do more than get out of the car, Bill pulls up in Richie’s convertible, with a spray of gravel, his face white. 

“Someone else needs to park this for me because if I s-s-s- _scrape_ one of those columns I will have a _heart attack_ , I am _hanging by a thread right now_ ,” he squawks in a rush, spilling out of the car and all but kissing the earth in his joy to be free of it. 

“Bill had some pelican trauma on the way here,” Stan explains. Mike just nods as if this makes perfect sense. 

“Come on, I think they need to see our IDs to check in,” Ben says, herding them gently towards the main office like a big, handsome sheepdog. Bev sidles up next to him and slips her arm around his waist, possessive and indulgent after hours spent across a seat in self-imposed touching jail for fear of sending them all hurtling into oncoming traffic. 

It startles a smile out of him, and his hand hovers above her shoulder, unsure where to settle, or if it’s allowed. 

“Welcome, welcome,” somebody’s grandma greets them from the front desk with a bedazzled seashell next to a rack of brochures. “How I can y’all today?”

“Checking in, ma’am,” Ben says, letting Bev pull him to the desk. “It should be under Hanscom, but it might be under Sjoberg?” 

The others mill around the office like ants, drivers licenses at the ready. 

“Are these for guests?” Stan asks, holding up a box with a picture of a dolphin on it. 

“Yes, all the puzzles, games, and books are rentable, just write down which one you take and your room number on the sign out sheet,” the nice lady behind the desk replies, her typing not even slowing. “Is this your first time on Sanibel?” She asks, looking up at Mike, who is eagerly perusing an island map on the wall. 

“This if my first time in Florida,” Mike says, like a kid announcing it’s his birthday, because he can. The woman behind the desk _gasps_ like he just told her he’s going to the moon, and proceeds to tell him everything he needs to see and do while he’s there. Ben and Bev smile like indulgent parents.

When they’re all checked in, keys in hand, and Mike has a pages-long list of local attractions in his Notes app, they shuffle back outside. Ben hands off the keys to Bev and goes to start bringing up suitcases from the cars. The door across the balcony from them is littered with pool floaties and tiny flip flops and shells arranged by color and size on the railing. 

It looks like a motel room from the outside, but the inside is open and spacious, a high, angled ceiling making it look bigger than it is. Everything is painted white, and there are a few sun-faded seascapes and illustrations of starfish framed on the walls. 

“There should be three beds, a trundle, and a pull-out couch,” Bill says, squinting at a print-out the desk lady gave them, while they all swarm the place like when they found a cool log in the Barrens. 

“I call the big bedroom!” Richie voice announces. 

“You absolutely do not,” Stan’s voice echoes back. 

“Ben’s our host, so Ben gets the big bedroom,” Mike agrees from where he’s investigating the lanai. 

The host in question shuffles in behind her, carrying about twelve suitcases and a stack of informational brochures clenched between his teeth. 

“Thank you,” he says, when Bev delicately takes the brochures for him. 

“The kids are picking out their bedrooms,” she says, wiping a tiny bit of spit off the corner of his mouth with her thumb. 

“I…what?” Ben’s expression swoops from _dazed_ to _deeply confused_ , and she grins, the expression feeling almost strange on her skin. Her face feels like it’s just stretched like a languid cat. 

She slides her backpack off his shoulder, and jerks her chin for him to follow her down the short hall and though the living room and into the big bedroom. She tosses her backpack onto the bed and Richie crows, “Oh, it’s like _that,_ huh?”

“It absolutely is,” she agrees, and shoves him out into the teeming living room. 

Ben is setting down luggage by the bed, distracted and sweating, his shirt sticking to the middle of his back in a damp patch. 

“Maybe I should offer to swap with Mike,” he says, frowning at the king-sized bed, made up with an ugly pastel coverlet patterned with seashells. “He’s so tall.”

“No,” Bev says simply, sliding in behind Ben to wrap her arms around his waist, anchoring her fingers in his belt loops. “I want a room with a door.” 

“I—okay.” His voice vibrates against her cheek where it’s pressed against his shoulder blade. They haven’t talked about it. There’s been no _time_ , everything since they arrived in Derry has just been one long cartoon scrabble over a cliff face, first Eddie, then the hospital, then the blurry chain of motel rooms between Maine and Florida. And the whole time, she’s been sleeping next to Ben, ever since she followed him into his room at the Townhouse without really thinking about it and they fell asleep with all their clothes on, unshowered and grimy as grave robbers. 

It’s odd, to feel the space where uncertainty should be. To know that she should be wondering if they’re taking it too fast, or if _she_ is, or if she should be giving him space, or time. But she doesn’t. She just feels clear-eyed, and calm. It’s the like the first time she ever wore clothes that had been tailored just for her, that audible click of _Oh, this is how it’s supposed to feel._

“Is it?” She asks Ben’s shirt. “Okay?”

“Of course,” he says, his whisper coming out as a rasp, and she smiles again at that nowhere-and-everywhere accent he picked up somewhere between 1988 and here, charmed. Ben stays still and steady as an anchor in her grip, even when she nuzzles into his neck, so she slithers around him in a weird little dance to press a kiss to his mouth. 

His lips are so soft against hers that the contrast of the scraps of stubble against her cheek makes her shiver in the blasting air conditioning, and she rolls her body into the warmth of him. He sucks in a breath at that, and pulls her bottom lip between his teeth—not hard enough to hurt, but hard enough that she can feel her pulse in her lip, pressing against his tongue. 

“Now where’d a nice boy like you learn to kiss like that?” She murmurs, crawling over him when his unsuspecting knees hit the edge of the bed and he sits down in surprise, all according to her evil plan. 

“Grad school?” Ben says, helpless, and she loves him so much she wants to break something. 

Like she summoned it, there’s a loud thump! from the next room and Eddie’s voice hissing “ _Richie, you colossal, Godzilla-ass menace!_ ” immediately followed by Richie’s shout of “ _It’s fine, it’s fine, it didn’t break!”_

“We should probably check on the children,” Bev says, pulling back with a sigh. Ben, looking dazed, lets her pull him to his feet and towards the door.

When they come out, Bev still with an almost-giddy giggle bubbling in her throat, Stan is standing in front of the sliding door to the lanai, oblivious to Eddie and Richie slap-fighting each other, his expression so strange. 

A decal sign on the glass says “ **AFTER DARK IS TURTLE TIME** ” next to a cartoon of a turtle with a watch and sunglasses. “ **TURTLES LAY THEIR EGGS ON THESE BEACHES,** ” the sign informs them helpfully. “ **THEY USE THE MOON TO NAVIGATE THE WATER. BABY TURTLES MAY CONFUSE HOUSE LIGHTS FOR MOONLIGHT AND BECOME LOST :( PLEASE KEEPS YOUR CURTAINS DRAWN AFTER SUNDOWN! THANK YOU!** “

“The turtle can’t save us,” Stan murmurs, his eyes out of focus, and something rushes in Bev’s ears—the ocean, maybe, or blood. _(The blood dripping down the tender line of Stan’s fingers…)_

“What did you say?” Bev whispers, and Stan looks at her without turning his head, his eyes unreadable, his mouth open. 

_(The ocean or blood?)_

“Pool! Pool, pool, pool!” Richie crows, and Stan startles hard, the movement completely at odds with his bearing, closing his eyes as Richie elbows past into the lanai. 

“We should probably go shopping first,” Mike says, sounding apologetic for being reasonable. “We’ll be too tired later if we go in the pool now.” 

“Pool later, pool later, pool later!” Richie adapts, pumping his fist like he’s a one-man rave. 

Stan opens his eyes and he and Bev just stare at each other while the others mill around them, and for the first time it occurs to Bev to wonder what the others dream about. 

  
They pack themselves into two cars—Ben’s rented SUV because it’s got the most room, and Richie’s rented convertible because Richie insists on driving Mike around with the top down so he can experience “the Full Florida”—to pick up groceries. 

The little shopping center is built in a square shape with a little courtyard in the middle, with little water fixtures and, for some reason, parrots. Stan perks up like a dog and makes a beeline for one of the tall, tree-filled cages, where a small gray parrot is eating a slice of mango with one foot.

The boys split up to buy food, and Bev devotes herself to the deeply personal task of deciding exactly which alcoholic beverages she would like to consume over the next week and a half. Corona, obviously, those go down like water, especially when they’re so cold and sweating in the thick heat, and limes because you can’t have cold Corona without limes. Bloody Marys for the morning, or whenever, really, Bev just likes them, and she texts _“BAG OF LIMES AND A JAR OF PICKLES, PLEASE”_ to the group chat, and then after a moment, _“SPEAR DILL, NOT BREAD AND BUTTER,”_ because not to generalize, but you can’t trust men with anything important. Hmm, what else? 

She gets a bottle of vodka to stick in the freezer, and _“ORANGE JUICE, PLEASE”_ goes to the group chat, and then _“NO PULP!!!!!”_ a second later. Almost instantly Bill texts back a picture of Mike holding a fat bottle of orange juice with No Pulp in big letters, giving a thumbs up. She smiles at her phone. Of course Mike remembered. 

She decides to be generous and texts _“BUYING BOOZE, TAKING REQUESTS, LIMITED TIME OFFER OR U GET WHAT U GET.”_ While she’s waiting for their feedback, she adds a pack of old school wine coolers (“Fuzzy Navel” flavor) to her cart because it’ll make Richie laugh. Should she get a bottle of wine? Wine feels disproportionately fancy for a reunion trip with a bunch of boys. Maybe she could make sangria? 

Stanley requests stuff for gin and tonics, so none of the limes will go to waste, and Bill and Ben both ask for beer. (Technically, Bill asks for _“beer, any kind!”_ and Ben asks for _“light beer, please :)”_ so she swaps her case of Corona for a case of Corona Light and grabs a six pack of Bud Light because no one is allowed to be classy on vacation, she makes the rules.) 

They meet back in the courtyard and Mike helps her move the neatly packed boxes from her cart into the trunk of the SUV. 

“I need to make one more quick stop, is that okay?” She asks. 

“Of course,” Mike says, smiling.

“I wanna look at the parrots some more anyway,” Stan agrees.

She leaves the boys in the courtyard, Bill and Richie trying to flip pennies into the top tier of a layered fountain, while Mike and Stan read parrot facts off little plaques. Eddie stands off to the side, arms folded and staring at a bright green and red parrot with like it’s a Jurassic Park velociraptor. 

There are a few little boutiques off of the grocery store, selling seashell souvenirs and blown glass ornaments and the like. She steps into a little clothing store, mostly selling beachwear and hats. Right away she spots what she’s looking for and grins. Her old design school training kicks into gear as she holds samples up against her hips, measuring their bodies against hers. She makes short work of her quarry so the groceries don’t have time to go bad, and high tails it back to the courtyard. The boys are entranced by one parrot in particular when she comes outside, a stuffed bag in each of her hands. 

“Cross-species breeding isn’t possible, they’re just friends.” 

“Just because they can’t have babies doesn’t mean they’re not in love. Gay marriage is legal now, Stanley.” 

“Stop sexualizing the birds.”

“ _You_ stop _oppressing_ them, how am _I_ the Catholic one here?”

“You are half-Catholic at best.”

“I thought you were Jewish?” Bill asks, looking lost. 

“Half-Jewish, it’s a whole thing,” Richie says, waving a hand dismissively. 

“Why is Stan oppressing the birds?” Bev asks, slipping in next to Ben, who takes the bags out of her hands. She lets him. They’re not heavy, but it’s still novel. 

“The parrot apparently has a roommate and Richie thinks they’re in love.”

“They _are_ in love!”

“Which one is the parrot’s roommate?”

“That little guy,” Ben says, pointing with his chin. “The little brown one.”

“He’s a sparrow,” Stan says. There is, in fact, a fat little brown bird sitting on the lip of a bowl of birdseed and fruit chunks, next to a huge blue and yellow parrot. As she watches, the parrot picks up a chunk of apple in its huge, hooked beak and tilts his head sideways to present the apple to the sparrow, who takes a thoughtful nibble, and then another. Bev sucks in a little gasp and leans her chin on Ben’s shoulder. 

“Oh, they _are_ in love,” she says and Richie sweeps an arm at her. 

“Bev agrees, they’re in love, Stan, you’re overruled.” 

Ben tilts his head so his jaw presses against her temple and without even meaning to she sort of burrows into the touch, turning her face to brush her nose against the warm skin of Ben’s neck, damp with sweat. She feels the soft whisper of her hair falling over across her forehead like a gauzy curtain. She presses her lips against Ben’s neck, the steady pulse point, just for a moment, and she feels Ben shudder. It makes her feel like a banked fire, like all she needs is a whisper of breath to make the heat inside her roar back to life. She pulls back, her hair falling back around her face and the noise around them cuts in again. 

“Let’s go before the ice melts and we all die from food poisoning,” Eddie grouses, looking at the big, gay parrot like it keyed his car and spit on him. 

“That’s the spirit,” she says, patting his arm, and Eddie’s eyebrows sink even lower on his face. It’s impressive. He won’t even need sunglasses. 

Ben tilts his head so his jaw presses against her temple and without even meaning to she sort of burrows into the touch, turning her face to brush her nose against the warm skin of Ben’s neck, damp with sweat. She feels the soft whisper of her hair falling over across her forehead like a gauzy curtain. She presses her lips against Ben’s neck, the steady pulse point, just for a moment, and she feels Ben shudder. It makes her feel like a banked fire, like all she needs is a whisper of breath to make the heat inside her roar back to life. She pulls back, her hair falling back around her face and the noise around them cuts in again.   
“Let’s go before the ice melts and we all die from food poisoning,” Eddie grouses, looking at the big, gay parrot like it keyed his car and spit on him.   
“That’s the spirit,” she says, patting his arm, and Eddie’s eyebrows sink even lower on his face. It’s impressive. He won’t even need sunglasses. 

Bev makes Richie drive her back in the convertible with the top down and it’s completely worth it, even if she has to hold a bag of groceries on her lap. Back at the condo, they all manage to carry their truly extraordinary amount of food up the stairs and bottleneck at the door while Ben tries to hacky-sack a bag of clementines to free up one hand long enough to get his keys out. 

While the rest of them empty out the groceries, Eddie and Stan get into an intense but seemingly cooperative conversation about how to best to organize the fridge 

“Oh shit,” Bill says, freezing halfway through trying to reach the top shelf of a dish cupboard, "I literally just realized I don’t have swim trunks,” setting her up perfectly to shout, _“Yeah, you do!”_ and grab her bag full of very secret purchases and begin chucking swimsuits at the boys heads. 

“Oh, thank God,” Bill says, slumped with relief. “I really thought I was going to have to go swimming in my underwear in front of you people again.” 

“These should all fit and also look fly as _hell_ because I am a _genius,_ ” she adds, crossing her arms over her chest and feeling smug. “And if they don’t then, they were mislabeled and I am still a genius.” 

“Thanks, Bev,” Mike says, his smile like looking into the sun. There’s a chorus of echoing thank yous and everyone splinters off to try on Bev’s finds. Ben lingers with Bev in the kitchen while she stuffs all the grocery bags into other grocery bags. 

“Here, I got you this, too,” she says when she’s finished, and tosses him a neon yellow rash guard. “That was the only color they had.” 

The naked relief on Ben’s face lops her heart into two neat chunks like a halved melon. 

“Thanks,” he breathes, his voice a sigh. She smiles, and lays one hand flat against his hip for just a moment, under one shirt but over another, layers even in this heat. He presses his hand over hers, holding her there, even as he ducks his head so his hair falls in his eyes. (Is that why he let it get so long? Does he like it that way? Or is it just another layer, something else to hide behind?) 

She doesn’t tell him that she understands. She doesn’t tell him that she hand’t even looked at the bikinis when she bought her own swimsuit. She doesn’t tell him Tom had only left marks when he meant to, but sometimes he _had_ meant to. She’s got scars she doesn’t feel up to explaining right now, ones even Ben hasn’t seen yet, only brushed his fingers over in the dark. 

She should get changed, but instead she just bums around, finding stupid little tasks for herself until Mike and Ben come back in their suits, Mike too excited to wait and Ben too anxious to rip off the bandaid. 

“You go ahead,” she says, “I’ll meet you down there.” 

“Drink?” Stan asks from the door of the small bedroom.

“God, yes,” she mumbles, leaving her sensible one-piece in its plastic bag on the floor. 

  
By the time the rest of them negotiate suits, snacks, towels, drinks, and preferred reading material, Mike and Ben have long since abandoned them for the pool. At the door, they all yell for Eddie to hurry up only to find him out cold on Stan’s bed, snoring cutely into the pillow, and elect to let him rest, then clatter precariously down the stairs in their flip flops and through the covered garage towards the pool. 

They immediately grind to a halt to stand in the shade like lurking mole people, staring at Mike and Ben, already climbing out of the deep end. Mike, head thrown back in laughter, _impossibly_ tall, and so _broad_ across, and— _you’re welcome_ —in dusty coral-pink swim trunks that are just a _little_ bit slutty because Mike deserves to have a good time, and honestly the rest of them do, too. Ben is shaking water out of his hair, smiling at whatever Mike said, technically modest in his rash guard and long shorts, but modest like a comic book X-Men suit, more of an implication of fabric than a reality. 

“Oh my god, forget this,” Bill groans. “I’m gonna go eat carbs in the dark where I belong.” 

But Richie clotheslines him with one long arm as he attempts to flee, and cheerfully drags him out into the sun and towards the pool. Bev pauses to put on her sunglasses, congratulating herself that’s she can still size people up on sight—even Richie, whose body is somehow equal parts “gangly” and “brick shithouse” in a way that defies explanation. A figure drawing class would find him informative. 

The black trunks she picked for him don’t have an obnoxious pattern he is no doubt craving, but neither do they give him a muffin top, so she’s earned her keep today. Stan, in an undone linen button-down over hunter green trunks with pink pockets, clinks his glass against her lightly as he walks past her.   


“Dude,” Richie crows as Bev settles herself into a deck chair, arranging towel, magazine, and drink just so. “If anyone should be half naked out here to give Google Earth a thrill, it’s you.”

“I burn easily,” Ben says, scratching at the warm gold skin of his cheek.

“ _Bill_ burns easily, _you_ get off on withholding.”

“I do not,” Bill snaps from across the pool. 

“Dude, you are literally already sunburned. You have been outdoors for twenty minutes cumulatively today. I don’t know why you won’t just accept that you’re, like, at _least_ half ginger.” 

Bill, whose stubble glints auburny red in the sunlight and has more freckles than Bev, insists that Richie is a dirty liar and Richie calls him a little ginger jorts _bitch_ , and Ben slips away into the blue water of the shallow end, quiet as a shark. 

He’s good at that, Bev’s noticed. Slipping away. Awaiting a distraction and then disappearing, even if it’s just into silence while the other bicker. But it’s too late. Bev _notices_ him now, always, like the temperature in the room. She pretends to read her magazine and watches him behind her sunglasses, the glide of water past his shoulders, the wet cling of fabric to his skin. 

She likes to dress the boys up in her mind, her little paper dolls, imagines how different cuts and fabrics would drape across their bodies—if she took in Stanley’s shirt across the shoulders, if she fitted Eddie with a tapered leg, Richie in a double-breasted suit jacket has been taking up real estate lately. She doesn’t imagine dressing Ben. In her mind she peels layers back, running her hands under each one as it comes off, memorizing the skin there until she can see it even under three shirts and a jacket, the only one who gets to know. 

It’s a shock, the rush of heat at that, completely separate from the warmth sinking into her from the heavy Florida sun. The heat rising up in her meets the heat sinking down into her and she feels almost dizzy, shimmery with it like air over a highway. 

She had to muffle so many facts of her body to live with Tom, to survive him. She held a pillow down over whole swaths of her life. She hasn’t let herself feel attraction in years, that gut-deep pull to someone, uncomplicated lust. Not even simple appreciation, acknowledging a face as beautiful or a man as handsome because Tom would _know_ , could _smell_ it on her, every time, until she had locked down her body’s reaction to so much stimuli that the only sensations that registered were the extremes. There had been whole months were she could barely taste anything that wasn’t salt, lemon, or vinegar, couldn’t _feel_ anything if it didn’t hurt. _(Show me what you’re gonna do with Mike.)_

She sets down her drink _(cold swell of ice, sharp fizz of tonic, bright bite of lime—and gin, that medicinal burn)_ and without preamble cannonballs into the pool. She spends what feels like a long time just sitting at the bottom, looking up at all that light. 

  
They eat sandwiches for dinner, too tired from travel and sun to make anything else, and watch half of a _Fast and Furious_ movie on TV while Stan calls Patty in the other bedroom. It’s not even ten when Mike kicks them all off the couch so he can go to sleep, and everyone’s too busy yawning to protest. 

Bev does a last patrol of the place before she can relax, peeking in the smaller bedroom first. Eddie is on one twin bed, sleeping like mannequin modeling pajamas, arms flat against his sides, Bill curled up on the trundle bed below him. In the other twin, Stan sleeps like someone used to sleeping next to someone else, his body tucked against the edges of the mattress, curled into a loose S, his hand waiting on his hip. 

In the living room, Mike and Richie are back to back on the pull out couch like two little kids (two _enormous_ little kids), Mike with the covers pulled up around his chin, Richie with his feet sticking out, his ankles long and pale .

They all look so young in the dark.

Ben is already asleep when she crawls into bed, starfished in the middle of the mattress, only managing to be greedy when he’s unconscious. Unlike Stan, Ben sleeps like someone who’s used to sleeping alone. But when she curls into his side, his arm wraps around her, loose and clumsy, still asleep, and she lets herself sink down into the warmth of him and for once she doesn’t dream of anything at all. 

“I’m making Bloodies, who wants one?” Bev announces the next morning, all of them scattered around the living room, except for Stan who is out on the lanai with his hands cupped around his eyes, squinting at birds. 

“I don’t know if I like those,” says Eddie, hunched up in a chair around a mug of coffee and looking dubious. 

“Is it because there’s ‘blood’ in the name?” Mike asks, sounding curious rather than teasing. 

“…Maybe?” Eddie says, uncertain. He looks very thin and pale in the diffused morning light. “Can I try someone else’s before I decide?” 

“Sure, babe,” Bev says, crunching around a preemptive bite of pickle. “Stan?”

“The osprey caught a fish, he’s carrying it back to that tree.”

“Is that a yes?”

“Yes, please.” 

“Anyone else?” 

There’s a chorus of _yeah_ s from everyone except Bill, who still looks groggy, and she gets to work, setting up cups like a production line. She’s feeling fancy so she salts the rims, wetting the lips of the glasses and dipping them in dark brown flavored salt before anything else. Ice next, then vodka, cold from the freezer. Bloody Mary mix (mild for Eddie), then a squeeze of lime juice from a fresh-cut wedge. A spear pickle (kosher dill, what else is there?) in each glass and a big glug of the briny juice. A celery stick to top it off because Bev is a traditionalist and Ben will feel good about eating a vegetable. 

She’s feeling very virtuous and pleased with herself as she hands them out, putting Eddie’s carefully into his hands, his grip still a little shaky. 

“I’ll just drink it if you don’t like it, don’t worry,” she says.

He takes a cautious sip and makes a face, probably at the pickle juice, but then takes another experimental taste, and then another. He licks the salt rim with the very tip of his tongue, and nods, settling back in his chair, holding the glass in both hands and Bev smiles to herself, feeling somehow like she’s accomplished something. 

When they all shuffle out to the pool again, Eddy’s sipped away half his Bloody Mary and he’s looking what can only be described as a little loosey-goosey. His big eyes are hooded and dark under his eyebrows. His hospital stubble is growing into a patchy goatee, and he keeps scratching around the deep pink scar on his cheek, catching himself, and tugging at his hair instead. (His hair is growing out just a bit, ungelled and frizzing in the humidity and Eddie pulls a horrified grimace every time he catches sight of it in a reflective surface.) 

Eddie had tanned easily as a child, she remembers, but now he has the pasty, tunnel-alligator look of someone who doesn’t get outside much and then lost a lost of blood recently. Which is to say that they are collectively equipped with six different kinds of sunscreen, ranging from 15 to 90 SPF, and two huge floppy hats one of the boys clearly selected for their sheer circumference rather than their style. 

So Eddie is sporting gas station aviators and what Bev is pretty sure is a woman’s gardening hat when he chucks a can of sunscreen at Richie and growls “Spray me,” like he is requesting that Richie chop his leg off on a Civil War battlefield. Richie, looking visibly alarmed, starts spraying Eddie’s back so inefficiently that someone simply has to step in. 

Bev has been a redhead her whole life and unlike Bill isn’t in denial about it, and is therefore the SEAL Team 6 of sunscreen application. She shoos Richie out of the way and sprays every inch of Eddie with 70 SPF sweat-proof sports sunblock, ruthlessly ignoring his constant yelps of “Fuck! Cold! _Fuck!_ ” and his convulsive shivers when the spray hits his bare skin. (There is a patch a red, shiny scar tissue in the center of his chest, circled with green-yellow bruising, and she works carefully around it. Anyone would believe it happened weeks ago. She traces its outline in the air above his skin.)

“Here, use this for your face,” she says when she’s done, tossing him a little container of the special oil-free kind she made sure to buy. Eddie nods in approval and smears it on, wrinkling up his nose when he touches his scar and then again when he hits depression beard.

“Aaaaand, I got this special just for your peace of mind,” she says, whipping out some hipster brand of actual old-school zinc for his nose. It is, inexplicably, neon pink, and the sight of it lights up something in the pleasure center of her brain. 

Eddie looks at it for a long moment and then asks, his voice low, “Will you put it on me, please?”

She pulls him in by the shoulder, and carefully smears the zinc across Eddie’s nose and despite the hot pink factor, he visibly relaxes once she’s done. She can tell he’s still self-conscious, though, the way his shoulders curl in protectively, like he’s shying away from something. The direct sunlight, maybe. Eddie’s hand goes to touch his chest, and then freezes halfway there, detouring to scratch at his cheek instead, hunching in on himself even more. Ah. Not the sunlight, then. What the sunlight’s showing. 

That, Bev can understand. The fear of exposure. Being laid bare. You can barely even see the mark on her arm in the sun, the searing light washes out the yellowing bruises to nothing, like an overexposed photo. 

“Now do me,” she says, holding out the tube of zinc to him. He startles, his big eyes jerking back to her from the middle distance they’ve been burning a hole into. 

“You want me to—?”

“Yeah, so we match.” 

She leans up, presenting her nose for ornamenting. Eddie stares at her for a long moment, big-eyed and hesitant, like she’s trying to trick him, Lucy with a football. He squeezes a blob of pink sunblock onto his fingertip and freezes, looking so nervous. There’s half a laugh bubbling up in her throat, but she swallows it down. This feels delicate in a way she can’t quite pinpoint, _Eddie_ feels delicate. Breakable. This means something to him, she realizes. 

“Don’t worry,” she says, “You can’t mess it up.”

He traces a cold line down the bridge of her nose with one fingertip, then does it again, thicker, building out from the first one. He sucks his lower lip into his mouth in concentration.  
“There.”

“C’mere, selfie,” she orders, dragging Eddie’s cheek agains hers with an arm around his neck. She takes six pictures in rapid succession, and selects one where she’s making a kissy face and Eddie is frowning at the camera, the light bounce off the pool making them look honestly pretty great. 

“Can I send this to the group chat?” She asks, showing it to Eddie. Eddie squints at it suspiciously, then flips through the other five quickly, then nods. 

“Don’t worry, you look cute,” she announces. Eddie blanches as the little sending sound effect bloops, and scuttling off to inspect all the lounge chairs for their shade coverage. 

She takes another picture, just her, leaning over so the palm branches make a little halo over her head (and if you can see a discreet dip of cleavage, well, there’s just no helping that, is there?). She sends that one just to Ben, biting her lip while it the thin blue bar stutters across the top of the screen and then pronounces it delivered. There’s a long moment where nothing happens and she licks her lips, feeling fluttery and nervous, almost fizzy. _A crush_ , she realizes with a start. _I have a crush on Ben._

The three little dots pop up and an instant later a big red heart appears. She has an insane urge to bury her head in a pillow and kick her feet a little bit. 

When Ben comes down to the pool a few minutes later, she’s draped across a pool floaty and sunning herself like a lizard. When she hears his voice, she opens her eyes and slides her sunglasses down her nose just enough to stare at him over their brim. 

“Here,” Ben says in his soft growl, and hands her a Corona, beaded with sweat and a lime wedge in its mouth. 

“Thank you,” she murmurs, and his fingers linger against hers. She holds his eyes for a long moment and then, so no one else can see, slides her gaze down his body and then back in a long, slow brush, and Ben does not blush. He just swallows, hard, and the dip of his Adam’s apple sends one droplet of sweat trickling down the dip of his throat and out of sight.

They could get away right now. She could forget something upstairs, he could go grab more beers from the kitchen, they could slip away unnoticed and she could follow that drip of sweat with her tongue and—

“Choose your fighters, we are playing chicken and I pick Mike and together we will be so tall that we are to fight the sun,” Richie announces, flinging his arms out and sending a spray of Corona droplets around him in an arc. 

“You are going to throw out your back and drown in this pool,” Stan replies, but Bill is already trying to climb up Mike’s back before Richie can beat him to it, Mike squawking in surprise. 

Ben smiles wryly, and Bev feels someone pull her away, but she swears she can taste salt on her tongue.

“Let’s go out for dinner tonight,” she says, later. “I don’t feel like cooking and I want to drink something out of a pineapple or a coconut or something.”

“Bev. My man. My best dude. Yes,” Richie replies from where he’s floating a pool noodle. “Pineapple drink. Let’s do that.” 

“I saw a bar near the grocery store that has hermit crab racing,” Mike says over the top of his cozy mystery he borrowed from the front office. 

“Oh, _hell_ yeah,” Richie says, sitting up so fast he overbalances on his noodle and tips face-first into the water. “This is my destiny,” he sputters, sunglasses sliding off his face, “I was born to be Florida Man.”

“If anyone asks this is re-re-re—background for a new horror story,” Bill replies. He’s leaning over the edge of the pool on his elbows, feet kicking aimlessly through the clear water. He already looks sunburnt. “About a crab plague or something. A giant, mutant crab run amok.”

“Does the crab represent the hero’s unaddressed demons from his childhood?” Stan’s sitting like he has all day, with his just feet in the pool, a loose button-down over his swim trunks and bare chest, seemingly perfectly at ease. “Does the crab get boiled because you can never return to childhood, Bill? Does the hero ride a bike while carrying a claw-cracker?”

“Burn,” Richie crows, still splashing, and sends the pool noodle flying through the air to slap wetly near Eddie, who hisses. 

Bill looks Stan with deepest betrayal, and spits water at him. 

“Gross,” says Stan, unbothered. 

“What’s that?” Richie demands, pointing at a passing tray laden with two whole pineapples with fruit skewers and umbrellas sticking out of them. 

“Piña coladas,” the waitress says, unbothered. 

“I want that.”

“Ooh, me, too,” says Mike. “Full Florida.” 

“Is it just the piña coladas that come with pineapples?” Bev asks. She wants that pineapple, but she’s not sure she wants it badly enough to drink something coconut-based. 

“Yep.” The waitress cracks her gum. 

“Would it be possible for me to have a margarita, but serve it in a pineapple?”

“Yeah, we can do that,” she says, not batting an eye. “Blended okay?” 

“Blended is perfect.”

“Regular or strawberry?”

“Strawberry.” 

“Cool. What about you, honey?” 

Eddie looks up, eyes wide with panic. 

“I’m on antibiotics,” he blurts out. 

“Okay.”

“Just a, uh,” he looks at the menu, flipping pages frantically. “A, uhhhh…lemonade.”

“Regular or Arnie Palmer?”

“Arnie…Palmer?” He say it as a questions, but their waitress, who has apparently seen some shit and knows she will see more and does not care even a little, just nods and writes it down. 

“What about you, sweetie?” 

“Just a Corona for me,” Ben says, ducking his head like this is a huge imposition, even though he literally just witnessed half of them demand their drinks be served in hollowed-out fruit. 

“Sure thing, sweetie. You, honey?”

“A gin and tonic, please,” Stan says. 

“You want an umbrella?” The waitress says, correctly intuiting their whole deal, apparently. 

“Yes, please. May I also have a water?” 

“‘Course, honey. You?”

Bill, apparently neither a sweetie nor a honey, orders another piña colada in a panic of rejection, and visibly immediately regrets it, but their waitress is already off to go sentence some more pineapples to death. 

After their drinks come and they’ve applied themselves to their task, Richie’s straw slurps loudly at the bottom of his pineapple, and he shoves it aside, looking full of purpose.

“Alright,” he says, slapping the table. “I gotta see a man about a crab.” He books it over to a table with a huge kiddie pool full of sand and plastic palm trees on it, immediately runs back and demand they all place bets on which number crab (1 through 17) they think will win the derby. 

Bev watches one hermit crab race with him, decides that watching hermit grabs slo-mo scuttling towards a bowl of lettuce and guessing which one will be first is boring, actually, and ditches Richie to what is very clearly some new hyperfixation. (“My crab is broken, this is bullshit!” Richie yowls, as she saunters away, fishing more ones out of his wallet.) She is halfway through another pineapple by the time he comes back and flings himself into his chair, helping himself to her drink. 

“Stan is rigging the crab races,” Richie accuses around the straw. “I don’t know how, but he’s running this racket. He’s in league with the crab bookies.” 

“Like, they’ve got little—“ Bill wheezes he’s laughing so hard, the little umbrella from his drink tucked behind his ear. “Little—betting books? In their little crab claws? Little—“ Bill covers his face with his hands, tears leaking out of his eyes, his voice a squeak. _“Little pencils?”_ Mike sticks another umbrella in his hair so it looks like he’s got little Sailor Moon buns. 

“Lucky number seven,” Stan nods, as though this makes perfect sense.

The scene ripples like she’s underwater and she has the strangest moment of dissonance. For a second she’s back the Jade of the Orient, and she’s laughing with these same men, and she’s shocked at herself. She’s afraid of men as a general rule because she’s a woman in the world, it’s just a prey-animal awareness. Tom’s tall, but Mike’s almost a full head taller, could dunk Tom like a basketball (and here she indulges in a little daydream where all her boys circle up to take turns just kicking the absolute shit out of Tom, imagines tiny feral twelve year old Eddie hurling rocks and kicking him over and over and snarling like a teacup junkyard dog) and she hand’t been afraid of him. She hadn’t been afraid of any of them, had gotten drunk and relaxed and she hadn’t been _worried_ , five strange-ish men, by herself in a strange-ish place, hadn’t even hesitated to order those drinks, knows she would have left her glass unattended and walked to her car in the dark without her keys out because she was safe with them.

Her body had remembered. Even while some distant part of her brain had said _What are you doing?_ over and over again, her body had remembered, and gently shushed it. When did she lose this part of herself? What blow from what boyfriend had finally knocked the last wispy memory of them loose from her brain? Somewhere inside her is there a healed fracture she could point to on an X-ray and say, _Here. Here is where I lost you?_

A brief shriek of feedback startles her back into her body and into this room as the crab race announcer taps the mic and Richie slaps a hand over Bill’s mouth, lest they miss any absolutely essential crab information. 

“As it is Saturday night and officially after nine, feel free to enjoy our bi-weekly karaoke night until our closing at midnight. Tip your waitress!” 

Bev and Richie lock eyes across the table, eyes huge and crazy, and Stan just sighs with the deep resignation of a man who’s just seen two toddlers spot a McDonald’s. 

_“Yes,”_ Richie says at the same second Bev hisses, “We’re doing it.”

Richie is already up and sprinting over to the karaoke machine to beat the rush of exactly no one while Bev starts physically dragging the boys out of their seats. Mike takes a little leveraging, which is mostly his size to alcohol ratio right now, but Ben comes easily when she slides under his arm, the sudden wash of his sweat-and-clean-laundry smell hitting her like a high. She goes to grab Stan’s wrist, but her hands remember before her brain, like always, and divert at the last second to poke at his shoulder while she urges _Come on, come on, come on._ When she whips around to Bill, Mike is already pulling him up, each hand wrapped around Bill’s biceps, pulling him up like a kitten, Bill limp and giggly in his grip. 

She rounds on Eddie, who is attempting to merge with his chair. 

“Come on, we have to now!” She says, dragging on his elbow. 

“I would literally rather get stabbed again,” Eddie says, gripping the table like she’s trying to talk him into getting his fingernails pulled out. Bill and Mike descend behind her and drag him upright. He’s so stiff she half expects his heels to leave divots in the floor like a cartoon character as they muscle him up to crowd in next to her and Richie, who is handing out microphones with laser focus in front the screen.

Bev can’t sing a note and she has never even once let that stop her and she doesn’t intend to start now as she locks eyes on Eddie, points a finger, and goes, _“Aruba, Jamaica, ooh, I wanna take ya.”_ She tunelessly lists various locations kind of near Florida until Richie finally comes in with a _shockingly_ decent _“Off the Florida Keys, there’s a place called Kokomo,”_ and plunges onward through the rest of the verse until he makes a frantic sweeping gesture at all of them for the chorus. 

When Mike comes in on _“Bermuda, Bahama,”_ throwing his voice so deep it sounds like an alligator bellow, Richie’s eyes go wide with delight until he squeezes them shut to really lean into _“Ooh, I wanna take ya down to Kokomo, we’ll get there fast and then we’ll take it slow,”_ somehow actually hitting the high note in _“That’s where I wanna go, way down to Kokomo.”_ Bill sings with great concentration and still gets most of the words wrong as his near-sighted ass squints at the screen, while Ben is mostly just mouthing the words and bobbing his head. Stan, on the other hand, has apparently committed to the bit now and sings the transition parts _(“Martinique, that Montserrat mystique”)_ with surprising competence, possibly because he knows he is the only one of them currently capable of pronouncing “Montserrat.” 

By the second chorus they are almost managing to sing all the parts, or at least some parts, kind of, and Eddie is having to work harder and harder to keep his mouth in a grim flat line. At one point Bev looks up from doing a little hip-swinging dance and singing, _“Key Largo, Montego, baby, why don’t we go”_ directly into Mike’s grinning face to find Eddie surreptitiously taking a video on his phone. 

She and Richie one hundred percent forgot that this song fades out instead of ending, and without consulting each other they all attempt to just sing softer and softer and hunching lower and lower until the music cuts off and they’re still whisper-singing in their microphones and crouching down on their haunches. Exactly one very polite Floridian claps for them in the echoing silence over by the crab table. They collapse into a heap on the sticky floor (Eddie looks appalled), in the kind of laughter that’s mostly silence and staggered huge gasps for breath. 

It takes them a minute to collect themselves enough to crawl back to their table and order another round of drinks and also French fries. The rest of the night passes in a gauzy blur—Richie loses a few more dollars on crabs, Eddie admits he doesn’t actually know if he likes piña coladas ( _“Or getting caught in the rain?!”_ Richie hiccups) and tries a sip of each of their drinks in turn, and she finds Ben’s hand under the table and holds it against her knee until suddenly they are in the car and a cool breeze is ruffling her hair through the window. 

Halfway home, Stan sits bolt upright in the passenger seat and blinks into the oncoming headlights like an owl. 

“Did we tip our waitress?” He asks with the quietly contained focus that on Stanley equals the kind of urgency usually revered for questions about nuclear codes. 

“Oh, I tipped that poor woman, like, two-hundred percent,” Richie says without opening his eyes. “I drew a little crab saying ‘Sorry’ on the receipt.” 

“Oh, thank God,” Stan sighs, collapsing back into his seat and apparently falling instantly asleep.

When they get back to the condo, the breeze picks up even more and she stands there for a long moment, letting it push her hair back from her face as tenderly as a lover and she wants to kiss the whole world. She kisses Ben instead, so. Same difference. 

She wakes up early, feeling groggy but not hungover, Ben’s side of the bed empty. She has a vague memory now, if she focuses, on his voice murmuring _it’s okay, go back to sleep_ in the blue dawn light. The old flat radio clock blinks 7:04 at her in red light. 

She tries to burrow back into the warm darkness of sleep for a few minutes, but she’s awake now, and the water bottle she’d guzzled before bed last night like a champ is informing her that she really has to pee. Sighing, put-upon, she flings back the covers and hobbles over to the bathroom, her joints all stiff and protesting. 

Her face is puffy in the mirror when she washes her hands, but she still looks better than she has in days, with a few solid nights of sleep under her belt. When she’s done brushing the stale sleep-taste out of her out mouth, she shuffles out into the living room in her pajamas, Richie and Mike still out cold on the pull-out couch. Richie’s cheek is smashed into the white sheet covering the mattress, a pillow smushed under his torso. Mike is squirming around a bit, his eyes still closed, like his body is deciding if it’s going to try and wake up, still on librarian hours. 

She works quietly in the kitchen, setting up an ancient Mr. Coffee, which begins gurgling cheerfully as she steals a plastic container of fruit salad to eat. She’s settled with her coffee and breakfast out on the lanai, curled up in a chair and watching the light change when the screen door opens behind her and Mike collapses into the chair next to her, a mug with a seagull on it in one hand. 

“Thanks for making coffee,” he says, his voice a deep rumble, still groggy. She _mmm_ s absently, and pushes the container of fruit salad at him, the fork sticking out of a chunk of strawberry. He sets his coffee down to grab it, and she stretches out her cramped knees across his lap. He uncrosses his leg to make it easier for her, then goes back to eating fruit with his eyes closed. 

Sometime between Eddie coming in, blanket-burritoed with a knit throw, and Stan arriving with the coffee pot to top off everyone off, Ben comes through the gate to the pool area outside and starts stretching. He’s obviously been running, his clothes soaked through with sweat and his hair hanging chunks across his forehead, and drops into a deep lunge, baring his teeth in a wince. 

The steady slurp of coffee pauses and Mike clears his throat. “Respectfully, Bev. That is a man.” 

There is a sound that she’s pretty sure is Eddie getting coffee up his nose. Bev just inclines her head in acknowledgement, feeling like a benevolent king. A story below them, Ben lays flat on his back to grab one of his legs behind the knee and pull it to his chest. 

“What’re we watchin’,” Richie says as he and Bill sardine themselves into the small space, Richie’s glasses slightly askew on his face and his hair sticking up in sleep-greasy curls. 

“We’re objectifying Ben,” Stan says around a piece of cantaloupe. 

“We’re—? Oh my god, Haystack is giving us the full _Flashdance_ ,” Richie breathes in a delighted whisper. 

“Is this…allowed?” Eddie hisses, looking at Bev furtively, but Bev just feels indulgently generous, like Scrooge at the end of the movie. _Biceps for the poor, biceps for all the poor!_

“What do you think he says to pump himself up at the gym?” Richie muses, grabbing the fruit salad to shove some grapes into his mouth. “Like, you know that cartoon where the little angry ripped guy is doing chest presses, just going _‘Gonna be so good at huggin’?_ ”

“Here we go,” Stan says mildly into his coffee mug.

“‘Gonna lift so many old ladies in walkers over high curbs,’” Richie says, throwing his voice into a low growl. Mike snorts and pretends he doesn’t. “‘Gonna be able to do the _Dirty Dancing_ lift. Gonna carry a dozen babies under each arm.’” Richie starts emphasizing every other word with imaginary bicep curls. “‘Gonna _heft_ baby _cows_ over my _head_ to _carry ‘em_ over _snow drifts.’_ ” 

Mike is fully snorting now. Bill slaps a hand over his own mouth to muffle a hiccuping laugh. Even Stan is struggling to keep his lips from twitching into a smile. Eddie sinks deeper into his blanket, mouth lemon-puckered and scowling, looking like the babushka who ran a hole in the wall Russian joint where she and Kay would get pierogis at 2 AM, six for five bucks, when they were twenty-three and always _starving_. 

She sips her coffee contentedly as Ben begins some strange twisting sit-ups with his hands clasped behind his head. It’s only the fact that she knows Ben will take it the wrong way if he looks up and sees them laughing at him that makes her put them all out of their misery, leaning forward as far as she can and wolf-whistling with two fingers in her mouth, loud as a lifeguard. 

Everyone else crammed into the lanai hisses and below them Ben startles, dropping out of his form to whip his head around until he cranes his neck up and squints. She knows the moment he sees them when he ducks his head and flushes as deep and splotchy as if he’s just run a mile— _another mile_. He’s smiling, though, lopsided and self-conscious. He waves a little with one hand, and Richie responds with what manages to sound like a sexually suggestive coyote yowl. 

When Ben gets all the way up the stairs and back inside Richie starts applauding and Mike flicks a grape at his head. Ben ducks his head, laughing (or maybe just breathing a little hard), and sprints to the bedroom, the shower kicking on a minute later. 

“I think I’m gonna roast that chicken I got tonight, are we all okay with that?” Mike asks, standing up and stretching his arms over his head. 

“Save the carcass,” Stan says, “I’ll make soup.” 

“Carcass,” Richie parrots happily, pleased with the sound. 

Bev has never had chicken noodle soup that didn’t come from a can. She remembers getting sick once, she must have been about nine or ten, one of those death colds that feel like every other cold condensed. Her dad must have remembered, somehow, probably from a tv show, that people ate chicken soup when they were sick. They didn’t have a tray to serve it on in bed, but he had brought her the biggest coffee mug full of piss-yellow soup that didn’t taste like much of anything except salt. It was too hot, at first, but she ate it anyway, because at that exact moment she really would have died rather than spoil that fleeting glimpse of sweetness from her dad. 

Once, Tom had gotten sick, and insisted she make him chicken soup, from scratch, it had to be or it wouldn’t count. She had made a big production of going out to Whole Foods and buying chicken, celery, onions, carrots, boxes of chicken stock, had followed the instructions of some embossed cookbook to the letter. The result was, predictably, awful, not really tasting of anything, not even salt, and she had carefully heated up the plastic tub of the premade food bar soup she’d hidden at the bottom of the grocery bag and served it to Tom on a tray and he had told her that he _knew_ she could cook, _see_ , she just didn’t want to _try_ for him unless he was desperate. 

She had fluffed his pillows and murmured that she would try harder from now on, of course. And then she had retreated back to the kitchen and heated up a can of Campbell’s condensed chicken noodle, as salty as tears, and it hand’t tasted _good_ , exactly, but it had tasted _familiar_ in a way that she clung to. 

Tom always had those sudden and specific expectations of her as a wife, things she should have known how to cook, how to do, how to be. She generally disappointed him, but the bruises were almost worth it, sometimes, because _fuck you_ she should known how to make a soufflé. 

She had sipped her soup and slept in the guest room “so Tom could be comfortable,” and it was the best sleep she had all year, even if she did have one of the same old dreams about a man’s glasses slipping off his nose and sinking as he floated face-down in the water.

Here, in Florida, in 2016, Richie throws his head back in that funny, gulping seal laugh, his glasses pushed up into his hair as he rubs at his eyes. 

It’s too hot for soup, really, but she absolutely does not care. When was the last time she ate something made by someone who loved her? 

Yesterday, of course. Or this morning, actually, if you count Mike slicing the fruit chunks, and she does. She thinks of Kaye making instant noodles, grilled cheese sandwiches late at night, how sometimes she would look at Bev and frown and say, “You need to eat a vegetable” and roast frozen broccoli in the their horrible little oven that almost certainly had a gas leak, how Bev had never felt quite so loved, so cared for. 

(Frozen broccoli, a postcard in her backpack, rocks flying across a stream, Bill’s palm wet with blood, Ben’s hand finding hers in the dark: her talismans flicker and rearrange and settle themselves back into order in her mind. That inexplicable gleam of anger sparks to life in her again, and she stifles it just as fast.) 

Here, in Florida, in 2016, Eddie’s annoyed voice is pitching higher and higher with every second Richie’s laughter continues, until he half screams, _“Of course the spoons are supposed to face the same direction, asshole, THAT’S WHY THEY CALL IT SPOONING,”_ and Richie collapses onto the counter, undone. 

Eddie used to tell them, thrumming with annoyance, how his mom would sometimes just inform him that he was sick, that he needed his _rest,_ and he would lose whole weekends trapped under blankets and comforters, subsisting only on the tea and watery soups she said he needed, Saltines if he was lucky. 

She remembers, now, that she used to think how _unfair_ it was, that Eddie’s mom did everything she wished a parent would do, and still managed to ruin it. The million different ways that love could be just more poison. 

Here, in Florida, in 2016, Eddie elbows Richie out of the way and starts repacking silverware into the dishwasher, spitting like a mad cat, and Richie pulls his glasses back down onto his face, still hiccuping. 

“Bev, can you help me with something?” Stan says, his voice quiet, his touch at her elbow grounding her here in the present. 

  
She follows Stan into the main bathroom, leaning up against the sink while he sits down on closed toilet lid, looking up at her with that same calm, unreadable face and shrugs off the pale blue linen button-down he’s been wearing all week. And now that she thinks of it, Stan wears a shirt that covers his wrists in the baking sun everyday and only ever soaks his feet in the pool, no matter how hot it gets. 

Oh, Stan.

“I need you to help me change the bandages.” Stan runs a hand through the hair at the back of his head, making the curls stick up very cutely. Bev feels a squeeze of fondness, like someone wrapping a fist around her heart, wringing it like a rag.“I was going to do it myself, but I had a bit of a…moment.” 

“Yeah, I’ve had some moments lately,” Bev says, giving him a wry smile. Stan is quiet as she scrubs her hands clean in the sink, and when she turns back he’s looking thoughtful lyat the floor. “Come on,” she says, crouching down next to him and reaching for his hand. “Lemme see.” 

“The, uh,” Stan pulls his hands back, and it’s still so strange, to see Stanley uncertain. “The…wounds feel…strange, and I don’t know what they’re going to look like. I think they’re just itching because they’re healing, but just in case…I don’t want to alarm you.”

Bev, who knows a layer of green-based concealer underneath regular concealer is the trick to hiding bruises and recently swam through a lake of blood, just smiles crookedly. 

“Stan the Man,” she says, taking his hands in hers and squeezing, trying to get him to meet her eyes. “I am surprisingly difficult to alarm.” 

Stan huffs a laugh at the floor, then looks up at her. “That’s not surprisingly at all, Beverly.” 

The bandage doesn’t want to come off, the medical tape stern in its duty, but Bev’s had some practice and knows to hold the skin taught and pull steadily. The bandage comes away a bit stained, old brown blood and some discharge, and Bev keeps her eyes on that to give herself an extra second to compose her face, keep it nurse-neutral. But when she looks at the wound, her jaw drops. 

“What—are they both—? They can’t—“ She pulls off the bandage off his other wrist, faster than the other, as fast as she can while still being careful. It’s the same. The skin is completely closed and mostly healed over, shiny pink scar tissue in a puffy line along Stan’s forearm. It looks like it’s been weeks since it happened, not days. 

Bev sits back on her heels, stunned like a blow to the head. She rubs her finger along her palm where her scar used to be and chews at the inside of her cheek. Okay. Okay, she can deal with this. Okay. 

“…Huh,” Stan says, finally. 

“Okay,” Bev says, the only thought she is apparently capable of right now. “Okay, this is okay. I mean, this is—it _is_ okay. We’re going to deal with this first, and then we’ll deal with the…rest of…this,” she gestures at nothing. “Okay,” she says one more time, just to get it out of her system, and pushes herself up to her feet, one of her knees making a weird squeaking sound. “Wait, here, I’ll be right back.” 

The stitches are tidy and neat, but can’t look like anything but an aberration against the smooth, pale skin there. There’s no way to look at them and not see violence. So she makes herself look at the threads themselves. Silk, she remembers, sutures are done with silk. Expensive. Tied in careful knots as precise as embroidery. 

_This_ part she knows. She is letting out delicate fabric, antique lace, because the body it contains has grown. 

She snips through the stitches with manicure scissors sterilized on the gas stove and—gently, but with purpose, a sharp flick of the wrist—pulls the threads loose with clean tweezers, one by one, from the soft skin near Stan’s delicate wrist and up towards his elbow. 

When she looks up, Stan’s dark blue eyes hold hers with a kind of gravity that almost ripples the air, his hand in hers an anchor dragging her backwards through time until she is in thirteen and dripping blood. 

“Thanks, Bev,” Stan says, his mouth tilting up at one corner. 

“Thanks for the laundromat,” she replies, and the other corner tilts up, too. 

Someone pounds on the door and they both jump. _“Bev, Stan, when you’re done with whatever weird stuff you’re getting up to in there, we’ll be down by the pool,”_ Richie’s nasal howl echoes back to them, and Stan purses his lips, as annoyed and dignified as a recently startled cat. Bev rolls her eyes and smacks the door, once, with the heel of her hand. 

“Beep _beep,_ Richie,” she yells back. There’s the thump and clatter of several people dragging beach equipment through the condo while Bev rinses off the tweezers and washes her hands, and then the front door finally closes with a slam. 

“You know, I really have wanted to go swimming,” Stan muses as he stands up, ghosting his fingertips along the path of scar tissue on his left arm. 

“Then you should go swimming,” Bev says, and the words feel full and true on her tongue. “You should do anything you want to do, Stanley.”

Stan takes her hand, not quite looking at her, not quite smiling, not quite frowning, not quite anything, and his thumb brushes so softly over the bruises on her wrist. When he finally talks, his voice is as soft as she’s ever heard it. “I wish we had grown up together.” What he does not say, but what she knows he means is, _I wish we could have protected each other._

She lets herself imagine it, for the first time, if they had never lost each other. She remembers the first time her college boyfriend broke her nose, that audible cartoon _pop!_ and for the first time she allows herself to paint in the Losers, imagines Stanley neatly packing up her suitcase, folding all her clothes while Eddie stuffs toilet paper up her nostrils to stop the bleeding, Mike holding a flashlight so he can see, imagines Bill sweeping all her junk into a box, the running commentary of bullshit Richie would keep spewing, how it would distract her a little from the pain. In the imaginary memory, Ben is holding her hand and doesn’t ever let go again. She holds his hand for the rest of her life, and is still holding it when they get that call from Mike, who wants to make sure Stanley isn’t alone when he hears they have to go back to Derry, just one more time. She holds the dream of that as gently as a baby bird. 

“We still can,” she says, and opens the door.

  
Bev’s got a drink in each hand for her and Stan, a towel around her neck like a dead gazelle, and a little bag of Cheeze-Its in her teeth—they’re technically not supposed to have glass by the pool but Bev only breaks glass when she intends to and she will follow rules in hell.

She can see the little ripple of awareness pass over each of them, the slow realization of Stan’s bare arms, the quiet math going through their minds, of his absence from the pool up til now, the long-sleeved shirt, Bev taking that call in the parking lot outside Jade of the Orient, the flinching reverb of the memory. Stan walks to the pool with that odd mixture of perfect focus and nonchalance that only he has, and eases down the steps of the shallow end, the blue water rippling out around him, up past his ankles, calves, knees, hips. He holds his arms over the top of the water and then, slowly, like the water is hot, lowers them. 

The quiet has officially stretched out into silence, so the clink from the ice in the glasses tinkles across the pool as Bev holds out the glass to Stan, who walks back up the submerged steps to grab the drink from Bev’s hand.

“ _Damn,_ Staniel!” Richie shrieks, his voice delighted. Bev looks up from handing Stan his G&T to find Richie pointing to where Stanley’s wet swim trunks are clinging to his skin. “Where have you been hiding that _ass?!_ ” 

And even though Bev may have just shared and witnessed a series of deeply intimate and vulnerable moments with this man, in her heart of hearts she is still kinda nasty, she cranes her neck around Stan’s shoulder to confirm or deny Richie’s findings.

She whistles. Stan takes a sip of his drink. 

_“I been_ waitin’ _for this one,”_ a muffled voice sings on Richie’s phone, and Stan sighs as Bev watches Richie’s finger drag across the phone screen, presumably turning the volume all the way up. 

“Here we go,” Stan says around his straw. 

_“SLOW SONGS, THEY FOR SKINNY HOES,”_ the phone blasts, echoing and tinny across the water. In the deep end, Richie is sunk up to his eyes like an alligator and giggle-snorting bubbles underwater. _“CAN’T MOVE ALL OF THIS HERE TO ONE OF THOSE.”_

Stan, with the serenity of a Madonna icon, arranges himself on a pool floaty and sips his drink. Behind him on a lounge chair, Bill laughs so hard he gets beer up his nose. In the shallow end, Ben is very clearly in an anguish of indecision as to whether or not Stanley’s honor needs to be defended. 

Richie frantically curates every song he can think of on Spotify for a solid forty minutes before losing patience and selecting someone else’s playlist, efficiently titled “Songs About Butts,” which is apparently twenty hours long.

It occurs to her only many hours later when they are all sprawled across lounge chairs drying off that they had all been too distracted by Stanley’s newly-discovered butt to even notice his wrists. 

  
Ben texts her the next morning while everyone is in the now-familiar shuffle of gathering pool supplies before going outside. 

_can you come pick me up? I think I overheated a little bit ;(_

and a second later 

_the frowny face was not supposed to be winking :(_

Bev texts back 

_oh yes ;) he fucking ;) was ;) where are you ;) I’ll come get you ;) ;) ;)_

_I think about two blocks past the hot dog stand ;(_

“Richie can I borrow your car for a minute?” She calls over her shoulder and “Yeah, live your best life” echoes back.

She misses Ben at first because he’s laid out flat on a bench, one arm resting over his eyes and the other flopping down to brush the grass. She parks and walks over to loom over him, enjoying getting to look at him unobserved while she waits for him to notice her. He’s wearing long shorts and a long-sleeve shirt, both black, and they’re plastered to his body with sweat. The muscles above his knee bunch and stretch as he moves one leg a little, pointing his foot and rolling his ankle like maybe it’s sore. 

When it becomes clear that Ben is so dead to the world that he is straight up not going to notice her being an absolute creep, she clears her throat loudly. Instead of the full-body jump she was braced for, he just rolls his arm a little so he can peek out under it at her. 

“Hi,” he croaks, and twitches his fingers at her.

“Hey, killer,” she smiles, crouching down next to him. “You doing okay there?”

Ben’s mouth curls up wryly. “I maybe overdid it a little.”

“Yeah?” She nudges his arm away from his face so she can lay the back of her hand over his forehead. This doesn’t really give her any new information besides “he’s hot,” but it seems like the sort of thing to do, the sort of thing she’s seen done. 

Ben smiles sleepily at her. “You have pretty hair.”

“And _you_ have a— _cute—face,_ ” she says, tapping his nose with her fingertip. He wrinkles up his nose at her and gives a wheezing little laugh and her heart just squeezes in her chest. Still clumsy, Ben flops his arm around to tug her hand down against his cheek. 

“Please don’t go, girl,” he murmurs, and presses a kiss against her palm. 

“Without you, New Kid? Never.” 

  
A truly Herculean effort and kind of a gross amount of contact-sweat gets Ben upright and into the convertible, flopped bonelessly in the passenger seat, sweat pooling onto Richie’s rented leather seats. Bev stops briefly at a minimart, putting up the hood and blasting the AC, and buys six fat bottles of Gatorade in different colors, the two things of Pedialyte she can find, and an ice pack. 

“What color?” She asks, holding up the bulging plastic bag of electrolytes. 

“Orange,” Ben says, smiling dopily at her hair. 

She cracks a Gatorade open for him and he sips at it until they’re back at the condo, where she makes him take the terrifying service elevator, shuffles him inside and arranges him on the couch. The ice pack she bought isn’t cold yet, so she sticks it in the freezer and just dumps a tray of ice cubes into a ziplock, and sticks that behind Ben’s neck. 

“Finish that whole thing, then you can nap for a bit, okay?” 

Ben nods, very serious, and drinks the bottle two-handed, like a little kid or cartoon bear. He’s so cute she can’t physically stand it. He’s so cute she wants to commit a crime. 

Stan comes in a while later, his damp hair curling wildly and the bridge of his nose a little pink from the sun. He tilts his head at Ben as he takes yesterday’s chicken leftovers and starts filling up a big cooking pot with water. 

“Everything okay?” 

“Yeah, he just overheated on his run,” Bev says quietly, sneaking away from sleeping Ben to lean against the counter while Stan looks through all the cabinets. 

“Do you think they have bay leaves in here?”

“Check in that little cabinet, I thought I saw spice jar in there.” 

All he finds, spice-wise, is salt and pepper and he shrugs and starts shaking them into the pot. 

“I’ll make a salad, too,” Stan muses out loud as he snaps the chicken carcass into chunks and dumps them in the salty water. “Soup and salad, that should be easier for him.” 

Bev frowns and opens her mouth to ask who he means when the pieces click into place—the endless beers and junk food and greasy restaurant orders, his feet on the bedroom floor before dawn to run five miles in 100-degree heat, _“All those sit-ups.”_ Oh, Ben. 

“Yeah,” she says lowly, and squeezes Stan’s arm as she sneaks past him. The ice pack is frozen now, and she swaps it out for the melted ziplock behind Ben’s neck, brushing the hair out of his face when he half-wakes and sighs into the coolness. 

“I’ll sty with him, you go hang out,” Stan says, settling down in the armchair next to Ben. “I have to keep an eye on the stove anyway.” 

“Are you sure?” 

“Of course. You go.” 

“You go,” Ben chimes in, not opening his eyes. “You should be in the pool. Stan will read me emails.”

“Sure I will, buddy,” Stan agrees gamely. 

Bev doesn’t argue, even though she feels like she should, but she wants to move more than she wants to shadowbox with some version of herself she can’t live up to. She walks away from them _(“Would you like me to read you my emails or yours?” “Yours.”)_ , outside and down the stairs, but she doesn’t head towards the pool, just keeps walking past the condo gates and down the sidewalk, the same way Ben must have gone.

She wore the wrong shoes for this, she can already feel blisters forming. She keeps walking, sweat trickling between her shoulder blades to pool at the small of her back. She didn’t bring sunglasses. Everything is blown too bright, it’s making her light-headed. 

There’s a little hot dog place, just one room with a counter and some tables outside, complete with a Norman Rockwell style picture of a kid in bow-tie eating a hot dog out front. Her stomach clenches like a fist and she turns on her heel, a little bell jangling as she pushes inside. She orders an everything dog with fries that come in a paper cup, and eats it walking, spilling half the toppings on the ground and not really caring. The salty-hot fries make her mouth flood with saliva and for a second the sensation makes her think she’s going to throw up. She stops abruptly and bends over, hands on her knees, and the feeling passes, leaving her just feeling overfull and weirdly embarrassed. 

A family passes her, a man and woman walking serenely behind a roiling swarm of little girls who shriek and shove as they run past Bev. One of them—probably five-ish with swinging braided pigtails—trips over her pink flip flops and lands hard on her knees. Her mouth opens in a wide dark circle, promising a tornado-siren wail, but before the noise even begins, the man swoops her up and into his arms. She shoves her face into his shoulder and muffles her cries into his polo shirt, her flip flop dangling from her little foot. 

“It’s okay, honey,” Bev hears him say before they’re too far away and the breeze snatches away the sound of his voice. “It’s okay, we all fall down sometimes.”

By the time she gets back to the condo, Ben is upright and looking sheepish as he eats crackers under Stan’s supervision. His face breaks into startled smile when he see her, like she’s a present he wasn’t expecting. Like she’s Christmas morning. 

She has blisters by each pinkie toe where her sandals rubbed. Ben carefully tapes a bandaid over each one, frowning in concentration. Stan smiles in the kitchen by his pot of soup and doesn’t say anything at all.

“You seem _chipper,_ Stanley,” Richie says over dinner, pointing his spoon at Stan with _j’accuse!_ flourish. 

“Patty’s coming tomorrow,” Stan says simply, and takes another sip of soup. 

And it really is that simple, isn’t it? Stan in her dream had looked so _neat_ , and...taken care of, looked-after, like a well-loved pet or a houseplant that got misted instead of watered. He looked like there was someone cared who what he looked like, and that he _cared_ that they cared. Before Bev knew Patty existed, she knew she loved Stan.

Mike catches her eye, and smiles, his grin wide and white in the lamplight and she smiles back without even meaning to, her body grabbing at the uncomplicated happiness her brain can never just accept. She takes another big spoonful of pale gold broth and tastes salt, but not too much, and vegetables, gone soft and translucent with time and patience. 

She carries her empty bowl over to the sink and pauses in the tiny kitchen, looking at them all spread out across the room—Stan and Mike at the tiny table, Ben sitting on the floor and crunching salad by Bill’s leg, Eddie curled up on the chair next to them and sipping soup out of coffee mug, Richie leaning against the arm of the couch and slurping a long noodle while Eddie calls him disgusting. 

Look at this, she thinks, standing almost apart from herself. _Look at them. Christmas morning._

  
“We’re, like, a five minute walk to the beach and we haven’t gone yet,” Bev realizes the next morning, curled up small on the armchair, the hood from one of Richie’s sweatshirts pulled up over her hair. There is a little gravel path that starts just past the condo’s recreation area and leads right to the ocean, but every time Bev’s looked at it it’s just seemed so _far._ Florida is making her lazy. She’s from Chicago, from Christssakes. She’ll walk three miles in the rain for the right kind of croissant. 

“Cheryl told me there’s a nice little coffee truck that parks about half a mile down the beach from here on weekdays,” Mike says from the kitchen, where he’s slicing a honeydew melon into chunks. “We could walk down after breakfast.”

“Cheryl the desk lady?” 

“Yeah, she’s great, she has a website where she reviews romance novels.” 

“We should go,” Ben agrees, accepting a piece of melon from the tip of Mike’s knife. 

“To Cheryl’s website?” Says Bill, his eyes barely open. 

“To the coffee truck.”

Eddie, who is still bleary with sleep, just says, _“Sand,”_ like he’s describing a nightmare. 

This somehow leads to Richie reenacting pivotal scenes from _Attack of the Clones_ , which somehow leads to him just flopping around on the floor making suggestive Wookie noises. 

“ _Fine,_ let’s go to the beach, stepping on a dirty needle can’t be worse than this,” Eddie finally caves, stepping over Richie’s prone body and sounding, Bev has to admit it, not unlike C-3PO. 

Bev and Eddie both adorn themselves with their giant ugly sunhats, so their little procession down to the beach looks like a flock of security hunks are escorting the _Grey Gardens_ ladies on their morning constitutional. The gravel path turns into a little wooden boardwalk over the sand dunes, sea grass and wildflowers swaying in the breeze. The boardwalk eventually gives way to soft white sand, and suddenly the omnipresent sound of the waves kicks up several decibels, punctuated by the occasional shriek of seagulls and little kids. 

They crest one last little rise and then the ocean unfurls itself for them, a foamy wave retreating back from them into water the color of tea. The water only looks blue farther away from shore, where some people are swimming and others have little boats anchored and bobbing in the waves. 

“Oh wow,” Mike says, shading his face with a massive hand. “That is nice.” 

Bev closes her eyes and lets the breeze hit her face, that slightly-fishy iodine smell of the sea she didn’t realize she remembered. 

“We should go swimming here later,” she says, and Eddie shudders. 

“If a fish touches my skin, I will physically kill myself,” he declares, and they spent the rest of the walk down the beach thinking up Things That Could Feasibly Touch Eddie In The Ocean until they arrive at a little cove that backs up to what counts as some sort of downtown on the island. She can see the signs for restaurants and hear someone blasting “Margaritaville” in the distance. 

And sure enough, just as Front Desk Cheryl promised, there’s a little food truck parked just off the beach under a palm tree with a little chalkboard sign announcing _COFFEE!!!!!_ In carefully composed cursive. 

They stop in front of it and the world’s happiest teenager, wearing a polo shirt and a visor hat, sticks his head out of the window and waves to them. 

“Morning! What can I gotcha?” He asks Eddie, who was clearly not prepared for this. 

Eddie’s eyes, dark and Bambi-huge, skitter across the menu unseeingly. 

“I’ll just, uh, black coffee—“

“You cannot have _black coffee_ at the fancy beachside coffee truck,” Richie says.

“C’mon, Eds, lives little,” Bill agrees. 

“I—“ Eddie stammers, looking at the menu with mounting panic in his eyes, that same old undertow of indecision threatening to pull him under.

“What if we each order something different,” Mike says, placing one huge hand gently on Eddie’s shoulder. “You can try a sip of each of ours and see which one you like best before you decide?” 

Eddie visibly relaxes, his shoulders slowly un-hunching themselves. Mike, adorably, pulls out his reading glass to perch at the tip of his nose so he can squint up at the menu and chalk-printed specials. This prompts a flurry of patting at pockets and necklines. 

“Damn,” Bill mutters, squinting at the menu and its tiny print.

“Wanna borrow my peepers?” Mike asks, pulling them off and holding them out to Bill, who smiles in relief. 

“I’d like a Beach Bum, please,” Mike tells the chipper youth behind the counter.

“Stan is standing _right here_ , Mike,” Richie says, indignant. Bill flicks him on the ear, and manages to order a Clam Digger without stuttering. Inside the truck someone else brings milk steamers and coffee drips to humming, clattering life. 

Bev orders something called a Rip Girl just for the name. To-go cups start emerging from the back of the truck, and Mike considerately hands his to Eddie before putting his germs on it. Eddie, shoulders up by his ears again, takes a tiny sip, and then another.   
“It tastes like…pancakes?” He offers the cup back to Mike, who tastes it, face thoughtful. 

“That’s the maple syrup,” Mike confirms. 

“The owner has a cousin in Minnesota with a maple tree orchard,” the coffee teen says without looking up from the iPad register. “Very serious about their syrup.” 

“It’s nice,” Eddie agrees, before trying a sip of Bill’s. 

Richie orders something called a Turtles All The Way Down (chocolate turtle flavored) (“No turtles harmed!”) while Bev and Eddie investigate her Rip Girl, which turns out to be a white chocolate mocha that somehow also tastes a little like cheesecake. Eddie shakes his head minutely, but Bev is delighted by the sheer weirdness and guzzles it happily. 

“What’s yours?” She asks Ben, who is trading sips with Eddie, both of them looking weirdly intrigued. 

“It’s called Tourist Trap,” Ben says, offering her a taste. “It’s got lavender in it.”

Bev takes a sip, leaving a sheen of lip balm behind on the plastic lid. It doesn’t taste _good_ , exactly, there’s an almost _dusty_ taste to it, but it cuts through the sweetness of the vanilla shot in a way that makes her pay attention to the way the flavors interact.

“That one’s my favorite,” the coffee child calls to them. “It’s weird, right?” 

“Good weird,” Ben agrees. 

Stan borrows Mike’s reading glasses from Bill, to peruse the options one more time before ordering. 

“Could I get a Shark Puppy? Medium, please?”

“Hey, secret menu, nice!” He dings a little bell shaped like a whale and someone whoops good-naturedly from inside the truck. “You’ve been to the island before?”

“No,” Stan says, frowning at the menu. 

The kid tilts his head to the side like a dog. “Oh. Well, you must’ve made a good impression—most locals never give up the secret menu to visitors.” 

“I must have,” Stan agrees, still frowning. He takes off Mike’s glasses and squints back at the menu again.

“You’ll love it, it’s got whip cream.” 

The coffee teens work extraordinarily fast, chattering little models of efficiency, and everyone’s just barely had a sip of everyone else’s drinks by the time Stan’s Shark Puppy appears in the window. Stan gives it to Eddie first, who sips and squints into the middle distance. 

“Okay, Eddie,” Mike says, rubbing Eddie’s shoulder. “How does the Spirit move you?” 

“The turtle one,” Eddie says.

“Yes, I win!” Richie crows, fist-bumping the air. 

“It was absolutely not a competition,” says Stan says, distracted, looking at his coffee cup like it’s a math problem. 

“Spoken like a loser.” 

“We’re all Losers, that’s the entire point,” Stan drawls. 

“Losers f-f-f-forever,” Bill says, grinning, and holds out his cup. “Apparently.” 

“Losers forever,” Bev agrees, and they all tap their cups together. “Losers forever and ever.” 

“I’m gonna go pick up Patty from the airport,” Stan says, pushing himself up to his feet. 

“I’ll go with you,” Eddie says, and they all look at him in surprise. “I know the way,” he says as if this is an explanation. 

“I can confirm Eddie is an excellent navigator,” Mike says from the couch, his odd, thoughtful expression not matching the casualness of his voice. 

“Okay,” Stan says easily. “Thanks, I won’t have to concentrate on the GPS then.” 

Eddie stands up, slowly, still holding his body very carefully, and looks at his own goosebumpy bare arms in annoyance. 

“Can I borrow this?” He asks the room at large, holding up a flannel shirt flung over the back of a chair. 

“Sure, Eds,” Bill says from the kitchen, plates clinking together somewhere out of frame. 

“Your jacket’s on the porch thing,” Richie says in his outside voice, popping up from where he’s sprawled on the carpet like a gopher. 

“Lanai,” Mike corrects. 

“Whatever. I can get it for you, Eddie?”

“This is fine,” Eddie says, distracted, shrugging on Bill’s soft-looking shirt. Stan reaches out and fusses with the collar so it lays flat. 

For a split second there is a look on Richie’s face that is _venomous_ , his teeth bared, an animal cornered by something Bev can’t see. Then it’s gone. He lays limp on the floor like he’s playing dead until Eddie and Stan leave. Bev, who is wearing one of Ben’s t-shirts because it smells like him and she likes it, watches without comment. You could never tell with those splashes of temper when Richie was a kid, whether it would be gone in lightning flash or linger like a smell, always so unbothered right up until he wasn’t.

Richie gets to his feet with all the grace of a capsized ship getting hauled upright and stalks into the kitchen, half-limping like maybe one of his legs is asleep. A moment later the sound of cabinets being opened and shut fills the room. Bill turns up the volume on the TV. 

Bev has to pull her feet off Ben’s lap to stand up, leaving a red spot above his knee where their skin touched. She rubs at it in apology without thinking and Ben sucks in a breath, his whole body freezing like a startled animal. 

“Back in a minute,” she murmurs, feeling very evil, and runs her hand up the solid muscle of his thigh, just an inch or two so her fingertips ghost under the edge of his running shorts. Ben watches her go with her new favorite expression on his face, a recently discovered find where he looks not wonderstruck at her touch, but just a little hungry. She could do things with that look. She intends to. 

Bev leaves her willing victim being and sidles into the kitchen, leaning up against the counter while Richie methodically looks for something first one cabinet, then another. 

“What’re you looking for?” 

“Cup,” Richie mutters in a nasal growl. 

“Lotta cups in the dishwasher.”

“Different cup.”

“Okay.” 

“So,” Bev starts, easing into it. "Eddie—“

Richie backhands a cabinet shut and Bev’s whole body flinches, every muscle braced and ready. 

She doesn’t remember closing her eyes, but when she opens them, Richie’s face has a slack, bell-rung look to it, the first time she can remember ever seeing him with no expression whatsoever. _(She will not think of the Deadlights, she will not go back to that place.)_ Without moving his head, his eyes sweep in a slow arc down to her arm, those faint fingerprints not quite faded to nothing yet. 

“So at the hospital,” he says, his voice perfectly, weirdly flat. “I was a little out of it.”

“Babe, you hadn’t slept in three days,” she says, automatic, half her concentration on forcing her muscle groups to relax one by one. 

“None of us had slept in three days,” he says, the overhead light giving his face ghost story flashlight shadows. “This—“ His hands held carefully down at his sides, and he flicks to fingers in an arc. “—happened there, too, and Haystack almost decked me and I didn’t…connect the dots.” The dots that a tall, angry man swung his arm around in the general vicinity of her head and her body went through the normal emergency drills, taking shelter until the sirens stopped. 

“Richie…” She forces her shoulders down, makes them relax, go slack. Her heart is still thudding in her ears. 

“So I’m gonna…” He takes a slow motion step towards her, reaching out one first one gangly arm, and then the other, to wrap around her as slow as easing into a cold pool, as gingerly. 

He hugs her very, very gently, and then—when she doesn’t tense up of pull away or start crying or whatever he’s braced for—tighter. Bev’s whole body switches gears from fight-or-flight to _safe safe safe_ , goes just _boneless_ , pressing her face into his broad chest. 

“I’m sorry, Red.”

“I know, Richie, it’s okay.”

“I’m sorry for the rest of it, too,” he says into her hair, and she squeezes her eyes shut hard enough for black and red lacework to bloom behind her eyelids. 

Bev eases her arms out from where they’re folded up, prayer-like, between their bodies, and wraps them around Richie’s big body, a handful of t-shirt in each hand. They stay like for a couple minutes or a couple hours until Bill comes into the kitchen, coughs very loudly and proceeds to make the most conspicuous bowl of popcorn in human history. Bev pulls away first, huffing a snuffly little laugh, and she and Richie each get a beer and some Cheeze-Its as if they have’t just been cry-hugging for however long next to the overflowing recycling bin. She wants to sit back down in the chair next to Ben at the table, to reassure him and his big, worried eyes, but she is so fucking tired all of a sudden, she can’t stand the thought of sitting upright. She sits down on the couch next to Mike and oozes into a slump and lets her eyes glaze over. 

At some point Ben leans over her to pass something to Mike, and she reaches up to intercept his hand. She holds it trapped between her chin and shoulder and Ben just parks himself on the arm of the couch and leaves it there. 

  
Patty looks the same as Bev remembers from the hospital, those blurry days when they we all still reeling, first from Eddie still being alive, and then Stan, one blow to the head after another. 

(How was it barely a week and a half ago? Time’s gone all taffy-stretched in the condo, the same way summer used to when she was a kid, the same way it did _that_ summer, languid and unhurried as a cat in the sun.)

Patty looks the same, but more so, like her colors have finished saturating, and Bev remembers, again, that voice on the phone, the stunned grief. Patty’s blonde hair is has just a bit of strawberry in it, smooth and sleek as a seal, and her sharp, delicate features are lightly etched with smile lines. Her glasses, a delicate cat-eye, don’t draw attention to themselves the way Richie’s do. She is someone, Bev thinks, who feels the need neither to announce herself, nor to hide. _Comfortable,_ Bev thinks, _she looks comfortable._

“Hello, again,” Patty says, easy. 

“Everyone, this is Patty, my wife,” Stan says, coming up behind her and setting down a mint green suitcase. “Patty this is Bill, Mike, Bev, Ben, and Richie.” 

“What is Eddie, Stanley, chopped liver?” Richie says, eyes huge with cartoon drama. 

“I drove them here, asshole,” Edie snaps. 

“She _has_ already met us, Stan,” Mike points out, but Stan just waves his hand. 

“That doesn’t count.” 

“I’m pretty sure it does count, Stanley,” Patty says, slipping off her light jacket and folding it over a chair back. 

“Have you eaten, Patty?” Mike says, standing up (and up and up), and giving her a welcoming one-armed hug. Bev should hug her. She should get up and hug her friend’s wife, she’s being rude, but _Jesus Christ_ , she is tired. She can’t even summon the will to sit upright. 

“There was dinner on the plane, but I could stand a snack.” 

“Perfect, I’ll make guacamole,” Mike says, rubbing his hands together. 

“ _Love_ guacamole,” Patty says, following Mike into the kitchen, “Gimme something to chop.” She makes grabby hands at the air.

Stanley is lit up, just watching Patty talk like it’s his favorite TV show, like he could look at her all day and not get bored. Christmas morning. 

“The librarian-teacher love connection can’t be fought,” he says, catching Bev’s eye. 

Stan clears off the little table and pours out the pieces of his dolphin puzzle. Eddie sits down next to him and starts methodically flipping every piece right side up. Richie of course cannot stand exclusion, and insists on helping until Eddie catches him flipping pieces back over on the sly and tries to beat him to death with the box lid. 

Bev blinks when Mike’s body suddenly blocks out the light and puts a bowl of guacamole on the couch between her and Ben and then a little bowl of chips beside it.

She glances at Ben out of the corner of her eye. She can almost see the math going on there now that she’s looking for it—technically all fruits and vegetables, which is good, but avocados are famously full of fat, but now science says it’s _good_ fat, and on and on in little spirals. She dips a chip into the bowl and scoops out some guacamole—that perfect creamy green studded with halved cherry tomatoes and little purple chunks of red onion. She takes a bite and _groans_ involuntarily. She tastes salt and the bright tartness of lemon juice. 

“Oh my god, Mike,” she says with her mouth full. 

“Patty helped,” Mike says, smug. 

“I did help,” Patty agrees. “ _Look_ how uniformly sized those onions are.” 

“They’re _so_ uniform,” Bev moans around another chip. “This is like—why does this taste so good? This is like the best thing I’ve ever had in my life.” 

“The secret ingredient is love,” Mike deadpans. 

“And light dusting of MDMA,” Richie agrees. A tortilla chip flies through the air and bounces off his head. 

Bev loads another chip and startles Ben when she puts on thumb on his lip. He lets her nudge open his mouth and takes a bite when she holds the chip out to him, the crunch loud and satisfying as broken glass. His eyes go huge and then drift shut. 

“Oh my _god,_ ” he mumbles, and Bev loves the people in this room so much it hurts like a bruised rib, but she wants them gone, she wants him alone on this couch with nothing but time. 

“Did you ever read _Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat?”_ Mike asks, settling down at the puzzle table with his own little bowl, obviously to the monumental effort of will it is taking for Bev not to peel Ben’s skin off like a cannibal. She should eat some more. Her fantasies are getting weird. 

“ _Love_ that book,” Patty agrees. 

“Guacamole has all those elements—I mean, I didn’t buy peppers, but the onion kind of serves the same job for the heat to a certain degree.” 

Bev isn’t patient enough for puzzles, but it turns out she loves watching other people doing puzzling—Mike finding all the edge pieces starting with the corners, Stan organizing pieces by color, Richie and Eddie slap-fighting with someone’s flip flops, and Bill holding up piece after piece and squinting through his glasses for minutes on end and finally pleading, “Do these two go together?” (“No,” Mike says every time, very fond.) 

Next to her, Ben is looking at work emails on his phone, one hand wrapped loosely around her ankle, as if reassuring himself of her. Bev’s never really thought of herself as reassuring before. She still sort of wants to bite him. 

After about an hour, Stan leans his chair back, pleased, and takes a picture of the finished product. 

“For my puzzle forum,” he explains. 

“For your _what?”_ Richie pops forward on his chair so fast he nearly tips over—Eddie erupts into a fresh cacophony of squawks. 

“Lots of people like puzzles, Richie, it’s not that weird,” Stan says, unbothered, and Patty comes around to wrap her arms around him look at the pictures, resting her head on top of his.

“Okay, Jigsaw.” 

“Oh, that’s sweet,” Stan says, presumably not in response to Richie calling him the guy from _Saw._ “Look at this, babylove, this person on the forum wants puzzle advice for her girlfriend.” 

“Oh, that’s so nice!” Patty says, pulling Stan’s hand closer. “That’s so nice of you—“ She squints at the screen. “—Forum User jessica2.” 

“Tell her to trap her girlfriend in a basement and make her chop off her own foot to open the escape hatch—and on the other side of the hatch is a wedding chapel,” Richie goes on, digging in. 

“That’s how I proposed to Stanley,” Patty nods, and Richie yelp-laughs in surprised delight. 

Ben snorts and gets beer up his nose, eyes watering, making him laugh more.

“ _Quick,_ Bev, give him mouth to mouth, we’re losing him!” Richie shouts, and Ben slaps a hand over his mouth to keep from spitting out his drink. Bev leans into the hand she’s resting her chin on, watching Ben try to compose himself over and over, only for Richie to set him off again each time he’s almost under control. 

She could look at him all day, she thinks. She could look at him all day and not get bored. 

  
The next morning Stan makes a _vat_ of scrambled eggs for breakfast. He mixes in something when they’re raw—yogurt or sour cream or something, Bev’s still groggy—that makes them deliciously tangy. Richie has already eaten what has to be at least an entire carton of eggs, half of them stolen off Bev’s plate like a dog, before lumbering upright to go change out of his pajamas in the big bathroom through her and Ben’s room. Bev watches him go through sleep-bleary eyes, sipping at milky coffee Mike brought her before she was all the way awake. 

“I’m making myself a little batch with just egg whites,” Stan calls from the kitchen when Bev is one her second plate, pale yellow clouds covered in ketchup and jut a little pepper. “Anyone else want some?”

“Only if you’re already making them,” Ben replies, sitting down in the armchair with his black coffee. 

“I’m already making them,” Stan confirms, and starts separating another egg into a mixing bowl. Bev can’t see Stan from where she’s sitting in the lanai, but she feels like he knows she’s smiling at him anyway. 

Bill and Eddie have, for mysterious reasons, been locked in bathroom for twenty minutes, but Bev wakes up all the way when they finally emerge. Eddie’s hospital scruff is gone, and Bill, holding an electric razor, looks immensely proud of himself. Eddie’s hair is still slightly insane, but he looks suddenly about ten years younger, his eyes huge and somehow vulnerable in his face. He looks exposed in a way that makes Bev want to shield him from view.

“I’m gonna catch a lizard today, I don’t care it bites me—“ Richie in his fresh clothes breaks off, blinking at Eddie like he’s staring into direct sunlight. 

“Oh good, the depression beard is gone,” Mike says, coming out the kitchen.

“It wasn’t a depression beard,” Eddie snaps, rubbing self-consciously at his chin. “It was a grievous injury beard. It was an aggravated assault beard.”

“You look like you’re _twelve,_ ” Richie says, sounding almost angry about it.

“ _You_ look like you’re _forty,_ ” Eddie hisses. 

“You both look beautiful,” Patty says soothingly.

“You do,” Ben agrees, his eyes big and sincere. 

Richie turns on his heel so he’s not looking at Eddie anymore, resumes talking like he was never interrupted. 

“No, seriously, I need to catch minimum two lizards today. This is my new white whale. I read this whole Florida Kid thread on twitter and this dude was like, ‘We I was a kid, we used to catch little lizards and get them to bite our earlobes and wearing them like earrings until they let go.’”

Eddie, apparently to horrified to actually form words, just sort of screams.

“They don’t break the skin!” Richie assures him, spinning back around. “I mean, mostly! They _almost never_ break the skin! Most of them don’t even have teeth!”

Eddie just sort of wails again, the disgust too big for his tiny human form. 

Bill sets down the razor, and swings his arm around, hissing. 

“I was so n-n-n-nervous about hurting his face that I was like,” and he mimes holding himself tensely, hunching his head down, fists clenched. 

“Does your shoulder hurt?” Ben asks, concerned. “Come here, I took a class.” He waves Bill over, reaching out. Bill squirms away, hunching up again. 

“You don’t have to—“

“No, c’mere,” Ben says, catching Bill the arm. Ben taps his fingertips along Bill’s shoulder and then jams his thumb into the muscle behind the shoulder blade and digs it in. Bill makes the single strangest noise Bev has ever heard in her _life_ , and avoids dropping to the floor only by virtue of Ben’s big, strong arms. 

“Oh my god,” Bill says to the middle distance, eyes glazed over.

“That bad, huh?’ Ben says sympathetically, and drags Bill up onto the couch. 

“Oh my god,” Bill repeats. Ben hops up onto the back of the couch and goes after Bill’s shoulder again, bracing him with his other hand, and she can actually watch Bill’s brain leave his body in real time. 

“Haystack, you have this whole secret life,” Richie says, leering over his coffee mug. “Are happy endings included, or do you gotta pay extra?”

“Beep beep, Richie,” Bill slurs, boneless and dazed. 

“Anyone want to go with me to the National Shell Museum today?” Mike says, looking at his Notes app.

“I told you, I’m lizard hunting today,” Richie insists. 

“Ooh, a shell museum sounds fun,” comes Patty’s voice from the kitchen where she and Stan are cleaning up the breakfast dishes in the sink. 

“I’ll probably just stick to the pool,” Stan says, shirt sleeves rolled up and scrubbing at a saucepan. 

“That’s fine, Mike and I will have fun, won’t we Mike?”

Mike grins— _yowza_ —and shoots Patty a finger gun. Bev wishes all the museum employees a very pleasant day and stretches out her arms before getting up. 

“I’m gonna hit the pool,” she announces to no one in particular. “Patty, for later, what kind of cocktails do you like?” 

“Ooh, I love a margarita,” Patty replies, drying off her hands on a towel. 

“Hmm, we’re woefully understocked on tequila—should we go somewhere tonight?”

“Yeah, we should celebrate Patty being here,” Ben agrees from the couch. Bev catches his eye and smiles. Bill, cross-eyed and drooling very slightly, makes a garbled noise that could mean literally anything. “Bill agrees.” 

“Oh, _hell_ yeah,” Richie crows, “Where we goin’? The crab place?”

“ _No,_ ” they all say in unison. 

“Oh my god, we can never show our faces there again,” Eddie hisses, aghast. “We’re probably on a watch list now.” 

“I’ll ask Cheryl for recommendations on our way out,” Mike says, and Bev leaves to go get changed, enjoying how the sound of their voices follows her the whole way. 

  
When Mike and Patty get back, they are all lightly buzzed and sprawled around the pool listening to Richie’s dramatic recitation of a romance novel he got from the front office. Bev, camped out under an umbrella, is painting her toenails a color called “Clambake” that she bought because she liked the name and offering the occasional commentary. (All of this is only acceptable because Ben is asleep on a pool float, arms and legs hanging in the water. She’ll wake him up in a bit so he doesn’t burn.) 

Bev shades her eyes with her hand so she can crane her neck up at them. “How was the shell museum?”

“It was great,” Patty says with a smile. 

“We saw the biggest recorded conch in Florida history,” Mike says, excited.

Richie perks up like a prairie dog and Eddie reaches out like Mr. fucking Miyagi to slap hand over Richie’s mouth on the inhale.

“I guarantee you, that is an inside thought— _eughhh!_ Did you just—how _old_ are you?” Eddie says, wiping Richie’s spit off his hands like it’s corrosive.

“Talk shit, get licked,” Richie says, smug, Mike’s conch momentarily forgotten.

Ben startles awake and tips off the float into the water. This, in turn, startles Bill into briefly drowning. Stan slurps his straw among the ice cubes of his drink, unbothered.

“Ooh, Bev, I got you sunglasses,” Mike announces and fishes out a pair of plastic sunglasses shaped like a pair of pineapples. Bev gasps and makes grabby hands. She pulls them on and the whole world goes blue-green, like she’s looking at everyone through a fish tank. 

“Eddie, I got you a fancy cup,” Patty adds, and walks over to present Eddie with a plastic travel cup made of sparkly blue plastic with attached straw. He turns it upside-down and glitter drifts between layers of plastic. 

“Why…?”

“It just felt right,” Patty shrugs, unbothered, and Eddie tips the cup the right way and watches the glitter fall again.

“I like it,” he nods, entranced. 

“Good.” She pats his head, and goes over to give Stan a peck on the lips. 

They all laze around for a few more hours before Richie announces that he’s hungry, actually, and Mike assures him that Front Desk Cheryl told them about a good place on the other side of the island. 

After putting on semi-real clothes, Bev’s new pineapple sunglasses still nestled in her hair, they pack into Ben’s SUV and Mike’s car, and drive through the creamy sunset to a bustling little restaurant strung all over with fairy lights. Bev can hear music coming from inside as they park, and she wraps her arm around Ben’s, feel drifty and romantic. Mike requests a table for eight and apologizes, but the waitress just laughs and says that’s nothin’, there was a bachelorette party here just last weekend, don’t even worry about it. The waiting area is in the back, string lights crisscrossing overhead, but the best part is a huge bird cage with two sets of lovebirds inside, paired up and heads tucked under their wings for the night. 

“You chose this place for the b-b-b-birds, didn’t you?” Bill says, laughing. 

“I sure did,” Patty says, looking very pleased with herself. Stan smiles at the lovebirds and reaches out a hand, holding his arm stretched out behind him with perfect faith. Patty takes it. 

“Hanlon, party of eight?” Someone calls from the door, and they all shuffle over, bottlenecking in the doorway, Bev pressing herself flat against Ben to squeeze through. Two table have been pushed together, one side with chairs, one with booth seating. Bev tucks herself into the corner, reassured by the sensation of being a little compressed. 

A jukebox is tucked in a little niche by the bar, huge and neon, three people lined up in front of it, quarters in hand. There’s a little square of linoleum nearby, and an older couple are showing their tiny grandkids how to jitterbug. Ben is watching them with the softest expression. Is that something he wants? Kids? Or just dancing? 

Their waitress sets them up with menus and waters, and promises to be back in five minutes. Bev flips through the laminated drink specials idly. At the other end of the table Mike, Bill, and Stan have all put on their reading glasses to peer down their noses at the paper menus. Bev sneaks out her phone and snaps a picture, angling the camera to include Richie. She sends it to the group chat with the caption “ _GLASSES BOYS._ ”

There is a cascade of dinging phones a second later and Mike pulls his phone out, frowning, then breaks into a deep, velvety laugh. 

“Poseurs!” Richie shouts, and shoots his straw’s paper wrapper at Bill’s head. Bill is still flailing, looking for something to throw back when their waitress arrives to take their drink orders. Bev orders a jalapeño margarita, because it had little flames around it on the menu and she’s never lost a dare in her life. 

“Ooh, Red’s laying down the gauntlet,” Richie says, across the table. “I want one, too.”

“I’ll try one,” Mike says good-naturedly. 

“Me, too,” Bill adds, looking determined. Mike quirks an eyebrow at him, and Bill’s face get red and even more stubborn-looking, arms folding over his chest. 

“You, too?” The waitress asks Ben with a smile. 

“Absolutely not,” Ben says with a low laugh, the sound like tires moving over gravel. “Could I get a bourbon with—oh, hello.”

A little girl, four years old maybe, with glossy black braids in her hair, runs up to their table and hands Ben a coloring sheet, giggling behind her hand. 

“I—is this for me?” He asks, bewildered. She nods, dissolves into tittering giggles. 

“Oh! _Thank you,_ ” he says, the exact—the exact—same look on his face as when he stared at her over the edge of his yearbook, that disbelieving pleasure in being seen and oh, Bev _love_ -loves him. “It’s beautiful. I can keep this?” She nods again and runs back to her parents, who give Ben a good-natured wave. He waves back and admires the colored-in palm tree before carefully folding it up and tucking it inside his jacket. 

“Beep beep, Richie,” he says without looking up. 

“I didn’t say anything!”

“Let’s keep it that way, please,” Ben says easily. 

Bev bears the waitress no ill will for visibly turning to goo at the whole display. It would be like getting mad at snow for melting. By the time she comes back for their food orders, Bev is halfway into her margarita, her lips pleasantly numb and buzzy, and feeling generous to the world at large.

“This drink is great, but I also feel little bit like my face is one fire,” she announces to table. Next to her, Ben goes rigid and still. Bev frowns, reaching for his leg under the table, while Richie tries to get Eddie to touch everyone’s faces to compare who’s sweatier and therefore losing. Then he appears to choke on some air and turns briefly even redder than Bill. Eddie dips his fingertips in his glass and flicks water at him like a misbehaving cat. _(“Gross.”)_

“You okay?” She murmurs to Ben, who’s eyes are closed, deep breaths expanding his chest with exaggerated slowness. 

“I’ll tell you later,” he promises, opening his eyes and giving her a wobbly smile. 

“Alright, everyone know what they want?” Their waitress asks, materializing at Bev’s elbow.

“Yeah, can I get the crab legs?” Richie says, face sheened with sweat. 

The entire table stares at him, in various states of horror, except for Stan and Patty, who just look confused. 

“Beep beep?” Bill hisses, his eyes bouncing back and forth between Richie and Eddie.

Richie shrugs, that weird rictus grin he gets sometimes stretching across his face like a wound. His eyes look flat and dead behind his glasses. The effect makes him look almost manic. 

“Well, either it’s going to be _super_ cathartic or I’m gonna start crying.”

Ben orders the steamed cod in the echoing silence, and they all hurry to follow suit, eager to give Richie a chance to shake off whatever weird fucking vortex his mood just got sucked into. Bev orders fish and chips because she wants the crunch of something fried and the feral pleasure of eating exclusively with her greasy little paws at a sit-down restaurant. 

Stan orders the same thing, and excuses himself from the table. Mike is looking with concern at Bill, who is the color of a cooked lobster and sweating profusely. Eddie is still just glaring past his eyebrows at Richie, who is guzzling water, a bead of sweat dripping down his neck. 

Three older couples are slow-dancing over by the jukebox, very casual, in a way that somehow doesn’t make a spectacle of itself. The jukebox hums and clicks and a new song jangles to life. Across the table, Patty sits up straight, her face lighting up, scanning the room to find Stan, who is leaning against the bar. He crooks a finger at her and she gets up, and hurries over with a laugh. 

_“Ooh, babylove, my babylove. I need you, oh, how I need you!”_

Stan smiles, his eyes crinkling up, and takes Patty’s hand, wrapping the other around her waist. They fall into step with the old couples around them, and Stan says something that has Patty throwing her head back and laughing. 

Bev leans into Ben, the warm solidity of him. It’s too hot for cuddling, the air humid with the crowd of people and steam from hot food, but she doesn’t care. It’s fine if their skin sticks together. That’s just fine with her, actually. 

“Do you want to…?” Ben trails off, nodding towards the dance floor. His body is rigid with nerves against her.

She shakes her head. “No. I like this part.” 

Stan and Patty dance for a few more songs, and their food is starting to arrive by the time they come back, out of breath and aglow. 

A waiter slides a neatly arranged bowl of crab legs in front of Richie, who looks at it very mildly, his head tilted to the side. 

“Yeah, no, it’s the crying thing,” he announces, and Mike slides the plate smoothly out of view and summons the waitress with some sort of secret hand signal. Richie folds in half in his chair, his forehead bonking the edge of the table on the way down. 

“There’s nothing wrong with it, he’s just not feeling well,” Mike says lowly. “Please leave it on the bill.” 

“Could I get, uh, some soup?” Richie’s muffled voice says against his knees. “Some soup and crackers, please? Any kind of soup, please?” 

“I’ll get you a bowl of chowder, honey,” the waitress assures him, patting his shoulder. Richie gives a thumbs up over his head. Mike reaches around the table corner to rub Richie’s back in slow circles, murmuring something too soft for Bev to hear. Next to him, Eddie keeps staring at where the crab legs used to be, his eyes out of focus, mouth slightly open, like he’s trying to remember something.

As quietly as she can, Bev slides out of her seat, and miraculously fishes two quarters out of her wallet. There is a neon sign of a turtle overhead, advertising some brand of beer, one of it’s fins burned out and flickering. There’s no one else in line for the moment, and it watches her over her shoulder while she flips through the songs, fingers crossed. When she sees what she wants, she bites her lip to hide her smile, and when she looks up the turtle’s bad fin has briefly flickered to life again. 

_“Bust it,”_ the speakers instruct fuzzily, and guitar riffs accompany Bev back to the table. Richie whips upright, banging his head again, like he’s heard a dog whistle. 

_“This here’s a tale for all the fellas, tryin’ to do what those ladies tell us—”_

Bev lowers her pineapple sunglasses onto her face and poses with her hand on her chin. 

Richie hiccup-giggles and then they all dissolve into slightly hysterical laughter with relief. 

“Smooth,” Ben murmurs, sipping at his drink. 

“You know it, New Kid.” 

  
They’re all punchy when they get back to the condo, that wobbly sort of high that comes after the release of tension. Richie is almost entirely normal now, even if he’s still pale and a little sweaty. 

They flop onto and around the couch and chairs, Patty and Mike folding up onto the floor with the ease of people who have led multiple read-alongs. Bill brings over a half-empty case of Bud Light and they all paw out loose, dented cans, the crack and fizz filling the room. Bev sips hers and doesn’t really taste anything but aluminum, but it’s nice to have something to do with her hands, and her mouth. The jangly flash of adrenaline from Richie low-key losing his shit at the restaurant has her feeling restless, fidgety, she can’t sit still. 

“How did you and Stan meet, Patty?” Mike asks, sipping his beer. His legs stretch out in front of him, long as a shadow, his feet almost touching Bill’s where he’s sitting on the loveseat. 

“At a college party,” Patty says, smiling, and that’s a hard visual for Bev to latch onto— Stanley, polo tucked into his khakis, holding a solo cup on a sticky floor while frat guys jostle him—doesn’t compute. “Or actually, I guess we met _outside_ of a college party. You know how when some people are old enough to go to bars and some aren’t, the parties sort of migrate? I was halfway between a house party and a bar and I looked up to see this guy lit up under a streetlight, very Dire Straits, holding a beer bottle in each hand and doing this little dance to make someone laugh, and I just thought— _‘Oh, I know you.’”_

Stan’s face as he looks as her is so soft and wide, wide open. Like he doesn’t care if anyone sees the naked tenderness there. Like the way he feels about Patty isn’t a secret he’s keeping, something vulnerable to hide away from a world that wants to hurt it. 

“And that was it, basically,” Stan says, smiling. 

“That was absolutely not it,” Patty says, rolling her eyes. 

“It was it for me,” Stan says simply. Next to her on the couch, Ben’s little finger brushes against hers, so slightly she should barely be able to feel it, but it goes through her like an electric current, along the back of her neck, the small of her back. 

“How did you know?” Mike, who is apparently a secret romantic, asks. His movements are loose and easy, the elegant lines of him all splayed out like that. She would dress him in a slim-cut suit, black, with a white shirt, crisp as fresh paper, cool as ice water. 

“I just knew,” Stan shrugs, an eloquent gestures that somehow explains that the fact is not unimportant, just simple. On the floor, Mike sits upright, his eyes sparking with interest. 

“Stan, how did you know which hermit crab to bet on?”

“…Pardon?” It’s odd, to see Stan genuinely thrown.

“I only had a pineapple and a half, so I was watching. You won, like, eighteen dollars that night—lucky number seven, remember?” Mike twists in his seat. “Richie, how much did you win?”

“Dude, I lost, like forty bucks in ones.”

Mike turns back to Stan. “How did you know the secret menu at the coffee truck?”

“I must have heard someone talking about it in town,” Stan says, but he’s looking sideways at Patty, who’s been watching the conversation bounce back and forth with fascination. Her face goes from scrunched-up confusion to wide-eyed comprehension. 

“Ohh,” she says, “You’re talking about Stanley’s psychic thing.”

“His _psychic thing?!”_ Richie shrieks, at the same time Mike snaps his fingers, grinning.   
“I knew it,” Mike says, triumphant. 

“You knew it? I’m sorry, you knew Stan had ‘a psychic thing’?” Richie snaps. Bev’s not sure why this, of the everything else they’ve established is apparently real, is what’s finally driving Richie over the edge. 

“Yes—well, no, not Stanley having a psychic thing in particular, but I suspected there was something more to—to us. To all of us. I mean, think about it,” he goes on, leaning in across the glass-topped coffee table. “We spent most or all of our formative years marinating in a magical cesspool.” 

_“Thank you_ for that lovey imagery,” Eddie mumbles.

“I thought maybe it had to do with the blood pact, but even before that we were different. _Think_ about it.” He eyes sweep to each of them in turn before landing on Eddie. “Eddie, do you remember that summer, when we were trying to find It? How did you know where to go through the sewers? How did you know how to get us back out? How did you know the way _here,_ for that matter? You made me ignore the GPS because you kept saying it was wrong, and it was.” Eddie squirms in place, pulling his sleeves down over his hands. “We followed you, and you just knew.”

“So you think those dreams I had, that was because of Derry?” Bev doesn’t mean to ask the question, but it blurts out of her mouth anyway.

“No, I think the dreams were because of the Deadlights. I think everything else you do is because of Derry.”

“Everything else I do?” What the fuck else does she do? What has she ever done? 

“We believed Stanley was dead because you said it out loud.” Mike’s eyes are burning now, bright as stars in his handsome face. Bev finds herself leaning in to him, magnetized, like he’s tugging on a string inside her, pulling her in like a kite. “After the first time in Neibolt, you said we had to stick together, that we were stronger together, and we _were._ ‘It kills monsters if you believe it does,’ that’s what you said to Eddie, and it _worked_. There’s no way that piece of fence should have done anything to It, but it _did._ ”

Eddie, frowning so hard his eyes are just shadowy pits, makes that weird little chopping gesture with his hands. “I was literally the only one not to kill It.”

“But you weren’t trying to kill It,” Ben says, his voice startling and anchoring her at once, the sudden awareness of his leg pressed tight against hers on the couch shoving her back into her body. She feels the strength of her own legs, the waiting readiness of her arms, her arms that pulled Ben out of the crushing weight of dirt, her clever fingers curling into fists against her thighs. “Not really. You were trying to save Richie from the Deadlights. And you did. Nothing like that worked to get Bev out of them, but it did for Richie.” Eddie, for some reason, burns crimson at this, and sinks deeper into his seat. 

“Because you _believed_ it would,” Mike agrees, with a sharp nod. “Because Bev _made you_ believe.” 

“So—“ Bev’s voice cracks, and she swallows dryly. “So you think, what? I can make people do what I say?” A hollow laugh in building in her throat. All she can think of is the long line of things she’s told people not to do that they did anyway. Stop is the only command Bev’s ever tried to give, and it has never, ever worked. 

“No, Bev,” Mike face loses its fever brightness and his voice softens. “I think you…inspire people. I think you can make people believe in something so completely that it becomes true.” 

“The slingshot,” Ben says, and Bev can feel his low voice reverberate up through her leg and into her bones. “We were out of silver bullets, but you pretended there was one more. Even It thought there was one more.”

“I think that’s why It went after you, Stanley,” Mike says, his voice very careful and clear. “I think it…threw the equivalent of a psychic grenade at you. Because It knew you were the biggest threat. You’re just so… _rational,_ Stan. I know you thought you were a wink link, but try to remember, _really_ remember. Even when we were kids, it couldn’t trick you, not all the way, because you knew what it showed us couldn’t be real.” Mike draws his long legs up, gathering himself in as he talks.

“Your…wounds, they’re already healing. Just like Eddie’s. Just like our old scars. But Ben’s scars from Bowers, they didn’t, remember? Because they came from _Bowers_ , not _It_. If we follow that logic, your wrists wouldn’t be healing unless they were tied to It, too. The blood pact.”

“That…follows, actually,” Stan says slowly, as if testing out the words. 

“I think…I think It _remembered_ you, how your brain works, and It used that,” Mike goes on. “It turned your against yourself. It made you take the logic to the extreme, convinced you that…taking yourself out of play was the most logical option, because It knew that if you set foot in that sewer as an _adult,_ the whole thing was over.”

“It seemed like the only option at the time,” Stan says, his face blank, eyes far away. 

“Your letter was very well thought out,” Patty agrees, her face thoughtful, not upset.

Stan blinks. “Oh shit, did you send those yet?” 

“No. I couldn’t face dealing with them at the time, and then the situation changed very quickly,” Patty shrugs. 

“I wrote you all letters,” Stan explains. “To be delivered after.”

“The letter Stanley wrote me was twenty three pages long,” Patty says. “The first eight were a very thorough explanation of why he had done what he’d done. _Very_ thorough. The other fifteen were just listing things he loves about me.” 

Patty’s voice doesn’t break when she says this, she doesn’t get choked up or stalled with the enormity of that. She says it the same way she said she loves Stan’s curly hair. Stan’s love is not shocking to her. Precious, sure. Treasured, sure. But expected. Not taken for granted, that’s not it, it’s Stan holding a space for Patty in his sleep. An expectation grown out of constance. What she’s seeing is two people who have grown into the shape of each other. That rushing in her ears is back. _(Blood or the ocean, blood or the ocean?)_

“When I was drifting off,” Stan says, “I suddenly realized I had forgotten something— she frowns when she’s concentrating, she’s always frowning at her phone like it’s disappointed her in some unforgivable way, and I forgot to tell her, and I didn’t want to die, even though I _wanted_ to die, because I needed to make sure she knew I loved her little frowny phone face.” Stan’s eyes crinkle up in a smile, wide and easy, and Patty grabs his hand and kisses his knuckles. 

Bev stands up without meaning to, jerking to her feet like she touched an electrical current, some sort of reverse convulsion. She hears herself say, “Excuse me for just a minute,” her voice that too-friendly Stepford chirp that kicks in when she’s not quite in charge of herself, running on emergency functions likes a dying spaceship. _(Blood or the ocean, blood or the ocean, blood or—)_

She walks out the door and down the stairs and out onto the gravel path, her body propelling her of its own volition. 

Tom never loved Bev, not for a second. Not one. Not when love is _this,_ is _refusing to die_ until your love is inventoried in its entirety. She stalks down the path to the wooden walkway, and those bright flashes of anger that have been chasing her down all week burn and coalesce into a churning mass in the center of her and its shape is this: _it is so easy to love in way that isn’t poisonous._ It is so _easy_ not to be jealous of other people who love Ben, who want him, even, it takes no effort at all not to let that pride she has curdle into possession. It is so easy not to mangle the love she has for him into a mouth that does nothing but consume and spit out. 

Men have been eating her life for as long as she can remember, tearing out wet, bloody chunks of it, swallowing down years, whole personality traits, the entire concept of two-piece swimsuits, her body, the idea of her body, all consumed. 

She’s across the dunes and on the beach. The air is so still and so calm, the lapping waves refusing to indulge her in even a little choppiness to match her. There’s a mostly-full moon overhead, making the sand brighter and the ocean darker, and she follows it like a cartoon turtle, the water the same temperature as blood where it climbs up her body, her good, strong body that has refused to acquiesce to everything that’s tried to kill her so far. Her traitorous body blooming with blood and breasts and her mother’s red hair. Her blameless body that burns and bruises so deeply at the slightest mistreatment, as if in accusation. The water finally closes over her head. She is weightless, suddenly. She wants to be done with it. She wants to possess herself for once in her goddamn life. 

Her scream is high pitched underwater, and sounds almost like it zings out of her like sonar, a warning to other predators to fuck off or find out. _(Are you still daddy’s little girl?)_ Air bubbles out of her mouth and she gets salt water up her nose and she screams and screams and screams until she runs out air and then she surfaces, gulps full, plunges down, and does it again. _(Not anymore, not anymore, not anymore.)_ She screams underwater until her throat is raw with it, until her nose burns and she can barely open her gritty eyes. 

_(Never again.)_

The anger doesn’t go out of her, but her strength does, darting away quick as a fish. She swims for just a few strokes until she can stand and then she’s sloshing through the thigh-high water and she is so goddamn tired. It hits her all at once and suddenly even the lazy little lapping waves are almost knocking her over, trying to take her out at the knees, twist her ankles, catch her toes.

Eddie is sitting on beach when she surfaces, a towel spread out neatly underneath him. He has another towel folded up next to him, and he hands it to her wordlessly as she trudges out of the water, that weightlessness solidifying into sludge with every step, to flop gracelessly down next to him. Her sodden clothes drag at her skin and bending her knees is suddenly a whole thing. She wraps the towel around her shoulders, not even bothering to dab at her hair, just letting it drip sluices down her neck and back. 

She’s not sure she even wants to be comforted right now, to be comfortable. She just wants to sit here in here and drip saltwater from her clothes that feel like they’re trying to fight back. 

She doesn’t look at him where he’s sitting next to her, but she is aware of his body, the space he takes up, the crackling energy he always buzzes with. 

The thing about Eddie, she remembers with sudden clarity, was that he could always take it as well as he could dish it out. Richie has that secret tender center that always took exactly the wrong things so personally, never what you expected him to remember, to fixate on. _(She could break Ben’s heart in her hands, she could crumble him like chalk.)_ But Eddie scraps and spits and gets over it. Eddie could take it, if she wanted to dish it, she thinks. Eddie doesn’t say anything, and the silence isn’t even particularly companionable because she can _hear_ him thinking about sand fleas, and somehow that helps, too. Eddie won’t break. 

“Do you ever hate yourself for getting yourself stuck in your own fucking life?” Her voice is a foreign thing, croaking and raw.

“Frequently,” Eddie says, his face grim.

“I’m so _fucking_ angry,” she breathes, her teeth sending off a spray of water droplets on the _f_ as they scrape against her lower lip. 

“Yeah,” Eddie says flatly, his voice hard, and she knows he’s not just agreeing with her. 

“I don’t know how to stop,” she says. It’s like trying to stop _bleeding_ , it just keeps gushing out of her, white-hot and slick as oil. 

When It stole that summer from her, all those summers, all those years, what It really took wasn’t just the context of her own life, it was the knowledge, the _certainty_ that she had people who would have died for her. That she had people who, with little-kid stubbornness, simple refused to let her die. After _all that_ , it’s so fucking stupid that a fucking alien hell clown made her forget that she was loved, and loved well, by _more than one person_ , that _fuck._ It had left her with nothing but the space that love should have gone. 

It’s not even magical, it’s textbook. She knows all this, she’s read the material, for all the good the material did her. So she knows that subconsciously she settled for Tom because some part of her brain had at least known how to _deal_ with Tom, and the recognition of familiarity had seemed like a comfort. She is so fucked up. 

But she realizes, shivering on a beach and unsurprised to find someone with a towel waiting for, that she remembers how to be loved, too. By Ben, the familiarity of his quiet waiting for whatever it is she wants to give him, however slight. By Eddie, even, his as-the-crow-flies efficiency, his stubborn loyalty. How could she have ever forgotten this? 

Eddie cleaned _blood_ off her floor, _Eddie,_ and he’s still here, ready for more, with a towel and everything. The rage goes out of her like a blown-out candle. She flops onto her back, fuck the sand in her hair. 

She rolls her head over to look at Eddy and he’s looking down at her that same exact look of faint alarm and _deep_ suspicion that she can practically _hear_ “Bust a Move” echoing behind him and she laughs, one hoarse bark, startling herself. The look just deepens on Eddie’s face and it’s _still the exact same face_ and she’s just—gone, hysterical, beyond all saving, laughing so hard she’s not even make any noise except the infrequent gasp of air. 

“Okay,” she finally breathes, hiccuping. “Okay, I’m good now. We can go back.” 

“God, you are _so_ fucking weird,” Eddie grumbles, even as he’s hauling her to her feet by her limp arms. 

  
Everyone is very conspicuously absent or focused on something else when they get back, Stan and Patty watching something on an iPad on their bed, Bill watching TV on the couch with Richie stretched out and glazed-over on his phone next to him. Mike is humming in the kitchen, chopping pieces of pineapple for fruit salad for breakfast. He waves at them as they pass, but doesn’t pause in his work. Bill and Richie don’t look up when she crosses by the big bedroom, but in a way that very clearly communicates that it is taking all of their combined willpower. She almost laughs. She doesn’t even feel embarrassed anymore, so she doesn’t feel grateful so much as charmed by their obvious attempt at consideration. 

Eddie peels off from her and sits in the middle of Bill and Richie, ignoring the two perfectly good chairs in favor of inconveniencing them (“Dude, why are you _sandy—?"_ ). She pulls the door shut behind her with a quiet click. 

Ben is sitting on the bed, his phone next to him on the nightstand, face up. He is very carefully composed so he does not look like he’s been waiting by the phone for her in an anxious panic for the last however long. His eyes look liquid and dark in the yellow lamplight. She leans down and presses her chilled lips to his forehead. 

“I’m fine. I’m gonna take a shower,” she murmurs, and lets his soft hair slip out of her grip. 

“Okay,” he says, his face still worried. 

“C’mon.” 

She sheds layers as she goes, leaving her tank top and bra in an inconsiderate wet pile on the carpet. 

She wants to strip out of this life, and it doesn’t matter if the skin underneath is young or smooth or unscarred, she just needs it to be new. 

Ben follows her into the bathroom, leaning against the sink while she lets the shower warm up, hesitant. His body language is the same as when he was a kid, head ducked and shoulders bowed in, trying to make himself smaller, to give her more space by taking up less. 

“Help me out of this,” she says, and what she means is _Help me out of this life, I want a new one, I think you do, too._

Ben sinks to his knees without a word and tugs gently at her unbuttoned jeans. She leans her hands on his shoulders as she wobbles on first one leg and then the other as he helps her peel the fabric off. 

She shivers hard, her bare skin gone all to goosebumps, purple veins splotching her arms and legs as she kicks her underwear off, sending it flying. She lets go of Ben to step into the shower, the water steaming now, and closes her eyes under the spray. God, that’s good. She scrubs at her scalp with her nails to get the sand and salt water out, and by the time she can pull her fingers through it again, she’s warm. 

She runs her hands over her own body, remembering it—the light tan lines bisecting her shoulders, the crisscross of scars by one hip, the odd dip of two ribs that healed crooked, the glossy scarring of a burn under her breast.

When she has taken stock of herself, she looks up, water sluicing down her face. Ben is watching her, as still as a statue, as patient. She reaches out and fists one hand in his t-shirt and pulls. He doesn’t even hesitate, just steps into the shower, clothes and all, letting the water plaster them against his skin. His eyes are dark as the ocean, dark enough to drown in, to disappear.

She pushes up the edge of his shirt and traces the jagged lines of the scars there, fragmented into new shapes by Ben’s body, the dip and rise of muscle. She wants to kiss them, and she will, later. She pulls his hand and lays it flat against her side, so he can feel the jut of her ribs. He follows the same path she did, tracing the shape of her, the map of things she lived through. His fingers settle in her hair, pushing it back, cradling her face, and yes, _yes,_ her heart burns, too, her heart self-immolated when he reached through the crushing earth, when he threw his love out to her like a lifeline, over and over, when he didn’t ask for a single thing back. 

“Hey,” she breathes, pulling him down to her, “I love you like crazy. D’you know that?”

He just smiles, his eyes crinkling up, his cheeks appleing under her fingers. “I do,” he says against her mouth. “I promise I do.” 

They peel off his clothes, tripping over his jeans, and Bev slaps a hand over his mouth to muffle his deep laugh. Ben’s eyes burn into hers and she replaces her hand with her mouth and swallows down every sound he makes like a secret.

They don’t even notice when the hot water runs out.

  
Bev wakes up because she’s cold, orange light just starting to cut sideways through the curtains. She’s kicked off the blanket and rolled away from Ben in the night, almost to the edge of the bed, and she army-crawls across the mattress to nestle into him, his body warm as a furnace against her chilled skin. He makes a wordless mumble, his voice even deeper with sleep. He sounds like an animal waking up. 

“Go back to sleep,” she murmurs, kissing his jaw. “It’s still early.” But he shakes his head, stubborn, and nuzzles into her neck, nosing under her jaw. His big hand pulls her hip up against his. 

“You should play harder to get,” she says, smiling against his hair. “I’m gonna start thinking you’re a sure thing.”

“I’m not gonna play hard to get,” Ben says against her ear, his voice just a rumble. "Too many good things in life are already too hard to get. I don't wanna be one of ‘em." 

In the living room outside their bedroom door, she hearing the pull out couch creaking and Mike or Richie stand up and shuffle to the kitchen, the soft clatter of coffee being made. 

Ben pulls back with a sigh and gives her a rueful little smile.

“Later,” she promises against his lips. 

Outside the sun is coming up. 

  
They’ve already voted to spend their last full day half at the beach and half at the pool, wringing the last drops of Florida out before they have to leave. Bev can already feel swoop in her stomach at the thought, the clenching sense of loss. She’s drinking in the sight of them all like water, watching them as they mill around the outside, suddenly starving for any details of them she might have missed, memorizing the shapes of their bodies. 

Ben is, there is no other word for it, shredded, and shredded by nature implies intent and purpose. Eddie, on the other hand, is anxiety-lean, like a whippet, his muscles pronounced more by an absence of fat. He has warmed in the sun these last days, even with all the sunscreen and hats. He’s lost that sallow, sickly look from the hospital as well as the pale wanness he had before that—not as tan as when they were kids, but now he looks like someone who probably doesn’t have to take Vitamin D supplements as a matter of course. It makes the pale scar tissue on his chest stand out even more. 

Over in the shade, Eddie is meticulously coating his face and neck with the special oil free face sunscreen she bought. When he finishes, he stalks over to Richie, holding his can of spray-on sunblock like a weapon.

“You know, I read an article about how aerosol sunscreen is bad for you because it lingers in the air so you wind up breathing it in,” Stan says idly as he rubs lotion onto the back of Patty’s neck. “You get aluminum and stuff in your lungs.” 

Eddie baulks to a halt in front of Richie, looking aghast.

“Want me to spray you?” Richie asks, while Eddie continues to stare at the can of sunscreen like it’s a beloved pet that just bit him. “Eddie?”

“No, just use the regular stuff.” 

Richie shrugs and squeezes line of 90 SPF across Eddie’s shoulder and starts rubbing it in, working in careful circles around the scar. 

Bev had taken a yoga class with Kay once, despite the fact that she fucking hated yoga, because it was one of the few things Tom thought was appropriate for her to do with her time, and therefore one of the only times Kay had to make sure that Bev was actually still alive. Once after class Kay had asked their instructor, with Kay’s trademark hawk-eyed scrutiny, how she chose which people to give adjustments to, since everybody seemed to know the forms already. 

The thin, lithe woman had met Kay’s eyes squarely. “I pick the people who I don’t think get touched during the rest of their day,” she had said, and Bev, who could still feel the gentle pressure of the woman’s fingers tingling on her shoulder, had locked herself in a bathroom stall and muffled her sobs into a sweatshirt.

People don’t touch Eddie in his normal life, Bev realizes, and he doesn’t touch them. He’s out of practice at it, shying away from Richie’s hands, even as his eyes drift closed as the sunblock covers his back. 

_That’s over now,_ she wants to tell him. _That’s all over now._ But she knows he’ll figure it out on his own. Richie finishes applying the sunblock and Eddie inspects himself for missed spots. Across the way, Stan puts on his sunglasses and ties his linen shirt around his waist. 

“Aw, c’mon, Miss New Booty,” Richie cries. “Don’t hide that light under a bushel!”

“That’s _Mrs._ New Booty to you,” Patty says, kissing Stan’s cheek. 

“Stan, I’m going to marry your wife,” Richie announces.

“Once I’m dead you can shoot your shot,” Stan allows, resting an arm around Patty’s shoulder.

Richie gasps and then spends several minutes tapping at his phone in furious concentration. A minute later there’s a notification to the group that the reveals an edited screencap of a Clickhole article and now reads “5 Times The Animatronic Fox On Splash Mountain Addressed Me By Name And Told Me He Was Going To Marry Stan’s Wife.”

“I’m printing this out and putting it on the fridge,” Patty says, cheerful. 

They walk down the beach, balancing two big umbrellas and all their towels and two shopping bags full of water bottles and snacks and paperback books. They spend ten minutes bickering over the perfect spot before Bev just sets down her towel and flops down onto it and declares the search done. There’s another ten minute fuss about the precise angle to set up the umbrellas, which Ben gently solves by understanding how angles actually work. 

Bev sprawls happily on her blanket tucking rolled-up towel under her head. Bill and Mike announce they’re going to build a stand castle. Ben starts arranging little shells by size and color on the towel next to Bev’s foot. Stan slips through a magazine with plants on the front. Gulls scream overhead.

“Can I borrow this? I can feel myself burning,” Eddie asks, holding up a light little scarf thing. Bev waves her hand in permission. Eddie, wearing his floppy hat and sunglasses, wraps Bev’s sarong around his shoulders. He looks like an aging startlet who came to the sea to remember her girlhood.

Richie snaps a picture and sends it to the group chat. 

“You should use this as a thirst trap if you ever wanna get back with your wife,” Richie says, taking a gulp of water. 

“I’m not getting back with my wife, I’m gay now,” Eddie snaps. Richie spits out his drink. 

“Just now?” Stan asks, flipping a page. 

“Ooh, I should introduce you to my friend Karen’s nephew,” Patty says, excited. “Very handsome. He’s single now, and he’s _much_ nicer now that he’s quit the paleo diet.”

“Paleo diet?” Bill asks, eyebrows wrinkled in confusion. 

“Yes, it was doing something weird to his blood sugar, so he was _always_ cranky and then he and his husband got divorced and now he can have carbs and he’s happy again.”

“…He eats dinosaurs?” Bill asks, looking helpless.

“I can’t—there’s too much—“ Richie looks back and forth between Eddie and Bill before putting his head in his hands.

“Excuse me,” says a man in a bucket hat and a t-shirt that reads _Turtle Hospital - Rescue Rehab Release!_ He’s looking down at Richie and blocking out the sun. “I’m sorry to bother you—are you Richie Tozier?” 

Richie looks up, blind panic on his face, eyes huge and crazy behind his glasses. 

“I—yeah?”

“Oh, wow, hey. Sorry, my little brother loves you. I just—actually, I saw that last set with him—“

“Oh, yeah, look, if you want your money back, it’s through the venue, but they were supposed to—“

“No, I just meant—I used to get panic attacks, too. I don’t know if it’s, like, a new thing for you or anything, and it’s none of my business if is, but—it’ll get easier, that’s all I wanted to say. I’m glad you’re taking some time for yourself, the ocean’s great for that. Anyway. Sorry for bothering you guys. Have a nice day.” 

Richie blinks several times and re-hinges his jaw when Eddie jabs him in the ribs with a bony elbow 

“I—uh. Thanks? Thanks, man, that’s really. Uh. That’s a really nice thing to say.”

The guy laughs, and resettles his hat on his head. “No worries, man. Good luck. My brother’ll be really happy to hear you’re doing okay.” 

“Tell him—ow, fuck—do you, uh? Want a picture? Or an autograph or something? For your brother?” 

“I mean, I don’t wanna bug you, but sure, if you want to, he’d love that.”

Richie clambers to his feet, spilling sand on Eddie, who looks aggrieved, and leans in for a selfie giving the camera a thumbs up. The man shakes Richie’s hand and wanders back down the beach to where a woman is waiting with a dog, and Richie collapses back onto the sand like a felled tree. 

“That’s the nicest thing anyone’s said about my standup in, like, eight years.” 

“That their brother likes it?” Bill asks, making a face.

“Literally, yeah.” 

“Is that how long since it’s actually _been_ your standup?” Mike asks, looking over the edge of his glasses.

Richie points a finger at him, and chugs half a water bottle. “Do _not_ perceive me, Mikey,” he gasps, coming up for air. “I am in _no_ mood.” 

“I’m just observing,” Mike says casually. “And speaking personally, resets are good. Starting over fresh? Very good.” 

“This guy.” Richie waves his hand in disgust. “Kills a clown, quits his job, and moves to Florida and thinks he’s hot shit.” 

“I’ve always been hot shit and I’m not moving to Florida, I’m visiting.” 

“Do you wanna stay in Maine?” Ben asks, handing Bev some sunscreen when she glances at her hot shoulders for the third time. 

“No. I just don’t know where I wanna land yet. I think I want to just…go. See what there is to see.” 

“Like, in the world?” Bill asks, perking up. 

“At least in America. I was so afraid to even go past the county line—I used to have alerts set on my phone every time I left town: REMEMBER. CHECK THE BOARD. I had this bulletin board in my bedroom with all of this information laid out, to remind me about it all, in case I started to forget. I’m excited to just…go,” he says again. “Thought I’d hit up some state parks, some Civil War sites, that sort of thing.”

“Graceland,” Richie says, snapping his fingers. “You should go to Graceland—‘Walking in Memphis!’” 

“The Grand Canyon,” Bev adds sagely, rubbing sunblock on the back of her neck. “I’ve never seen that, either. Or the Redwoods.”

“Just America?” Bill asks, fidgeting with a chunk of broken seashell. 

Mike breaks into a smile. “I could maybe be persuaded to cross an ocean.” 

“I don't wanna live in New York anymore,” Eddie blurts out, apropos of nothing. They all pause what they're doing, sand falling through Richie’s thick fingers like it’s proving a point. “I don’t wanna live in New York anymore,” he repeats, his voice gaining that old frantic momentum with every word, like his thought process is stumbling down a hill. “I think I hate it there. It's gross and it's dirty and everyone says it smells and I thought that was just out of town people being jackasses, but I think I just hadn't left in so long because it absolutely smells, and I hate that my windows look into other windows and I hate that somehow I have to just accept that rats are a normal thing to see during the day and I _HATE BAGELS._ ” His breath is coming in short, frantic pants, and Bev is alarmed to realize he’s almost in tears.   
  
“Hey,” she says, touching his hand, “You don’t have to live in New York if you don’t want to. You don't have to go back.”

“You can stay in Georgia with us for a while,” Patty says, warm. “As long as you'd like. Forever, if you like it. We’d help you find a place when you're ready."   
  
“England’s so picturesque, you'd love it," says Bill. “We’ve got this country place out in the Cotswold’s, the back yard is just like a field of wildflowers—"

“I can give you a video tour of every town I drive through in the continental United States until you find one you like,” Mike cuts in, all of them talking over each other.   
  
“I have a place in Nebraska,” Ben says, squeezing Eddie’s hand over Bev’s. “In summer twilight last for hours. And you’ve never seen anything like that much open space all covered in snow.” 

“You can live in L.A. with me,” Richie says and Eddie’s whole face crumples in on itself. Richie looks like he just dropped a baby. 

“LA is just, like, _hot_ New York,” Eddie almost wails. 

“We don’t have to live in LA,” Richie says frantically. “We can live in one of the stupid— Passadena, or wherever. I hate my house, anyway, living there is like some Opus Dei thing I’m doing to myself so being on tour is somehow less shitty than being home. What about, like, Silverlake? You wanna live in Silverlake?”

“Are there—bagels? In Silverlake?” Eddie asks, breath heaving. 

“I mean, probably, somewhere, there are some bagels, but I will personally report every bagel place in the state of California to the Department of Health. I’ll burn their empire to the ground. I will create a bagel dead zone for you.” 

“Okay,” Eddie gulps. 

“Okay?” Richie’s face ping-pong between them all, eyes crazy. “Okay what?” 

“Okay I’ll live with you in Silverlake.” Eddie says, grinding the heels of his hands into his eyes. “Just for, like. A while. Until my life is less stupid.” 

“Because you’re gay and getting divorced?” Bill asks, looking for confirmation. 

“ _Yes, Bill, thank you,”_ Eddie hisses, throwing sand at him. 

“Okay, cool, got it. Do you want some water?” Eddie snatches a water bottle out of Bill’s hands and takes a breathless gulp. Bev holds another one against the back of his neck. Eddie shivers, but starts to relax. 

They stay on the beach until lunch. They _almost_ have Eddie convinced to maybe dip just his toes in the water when he spots a single fish and screams that the ocean is his enemy and runs the whole way back to the condo. 

Lunch is a grab bag, trying to use up all their leftover food before they leave, sandwiches and bits of fruit and yogurt. Mike chugs half a carton of grapefruit juice just to be done with it. They tally all their leftover alcohol and make themselves a round of drinks to finish off the bottle of gin, which leaves everyone loose-limbed and lazy. It makes Bev want to sun herself, lizard-like, on a rock outside. Mike leads the way and Bev trails after him, memorizing the width of his shoulders, the tilt of his head. Ben follows her out, his hand easy on the small of her back as they make their way to the pool. Ben closes the gate behind them while Bev drops her things on a lounge chair. 

There’s a man waving hello to them from the far side of the pool area, like he came up from one of the other units. People have stopped by occasionally, asking to borrow pool floats or chairs. Bev raises her hand to her eyes so she can see him more clearly. 

“There you are,” he says. “I’ve been looking for you everywhere.” 

His face is so pleasant, that warm, dead-eyed smile, but he is walking towards her like hunter. 

She is outside herself, distantly aware that her knees have stopped working, that someone is holding her upright and that’s so much worse, if he sees someone holding her. 

Her credit cards. Her _cell phone_ , she never even thought to get rid of them, to hide—she confused feeling safe with being safe because she never, ever learns. 

“Tom,” she breathes, the sound a strangled gasp, and the arms around her freeze, then tighten. 

Her hands are numb, her lips, her feet. Everything is too bright to see. That rushing in her ears. _(Blood or the ocean?)_

_(Blood.)_

“Stop him.” Ben’s voice. Bev recognizes that tone, the same one so many friends and roommates and ER nurses have used, holding tissues to her nose, her lips, the calm focus of triage. 

Tom keeps walking, building up momentum and Mike sticks his hand out and Tom—stops. Tom looks...Tom looks uncomprehending, actually. Mike just looks puzzled, like he would if a small dog came up and chewed on his shoe. Tom tries to barrel past him, but he just stays, held in place by the brick wall of Mike’s arm.

Richie comes in through the gate behind them. “Hey guy, if you’re a fan it’s fine, but this is actually private property, so we can just—Bev?” 

His voice is so soft and so concerned that he sounds like he did that summer, like his voice hasn’t changed yet, like none of him had. The force of it pulls Bev’s gaze away from Tom to Richie, his eyes big and still as water behind his glasses. His eye widen very slightly. Sunlight flashes off the lenses. 

“Bev? This is the guy?” 

“ _This_ is the guy?” Mike asks, comprehension flooding his face, which then goes very, very calm.

“This is the guy,” Richie confirms, picking up a collapsed beach umbrella, testing the heft of it casually. 

“Hey—oh, who’s this?” Bill’s voice, friendly.

“This is the guy,” Mike says, his voice a calm, flat line. 

Bill’s chlorine blue eyes flash so bright Bev can’t see, so bright her hand is dripping blood on the grass. “Is that right.” Eddie and Stan are there, on either side of Bill, when did they get there, she can’t see right, she can’t breathe. Darkness teases at the edges of her vision. 

The fantasy was never supposed to be real, and Bev thinks _I caused this, I made this happen_ , the thought swelling up in her like nausea. Mike said she could make people believe and this is where it has led. All she can see are Tom’s hands, Eddie’s bare chest, Stan’s pale wrists, Tom’s hands, Tom’s hands, Tom’s hands.

The boys span out in front of her, in even step, a smooth formation. She forgets sometimes, that the four of them were a single unit for years before there were seven of them. Bill, Richie, Eddie, and Stan start moving with careful purpose and Bev thinks of nothing so much as hunting packs. Or birds in flight.

“I just need to speak to my wife for moment, gentlemen, I’m sure you don’t mind if I steal her from you for just a second. I’ve been worried.” Tom smiles, that _you’re making a scene_ smile, so warm while he squeezed bruises onto her skin under the table, and tries to shoulder past Mike. 

Ben eases Bev behind him, Ben makes himself a wall, four walls, a clubhouse, something built to keep her safe, where the same men she’s been running from her whole fucking life can’t find her.

“You good, Mike?” Bill asks, his eyes the brightest thing Bev can see. 

_“Mike?”_ Tom says, and she sees the exact moment he stops caring about what these people think of him, when turn from _witnesses_ into simply _someone who’s touched something that belongs to him_ , his blandly pleasant face turning into an animal’s—crazy, spitting, teeth bared in a snarl. “This the guy you’ve been fucking, Bevvy?” He spits over Mike’s shoulder. His eyes _sear_ her, they _burn_ where they land on her, on Ben’s good, calloused hands holding her up. “Or is it all of them? Huh—did you all get a turn?” 

“Yeah, that’s about enough of that,” Mike says calmly, and lets go of Tom and takes a step back. Momentarily thrown off balance, Tom lunges forward—Richie whips him in the face with a pool noodle. 

“I will full 'Goodbye Earl' you, fucker, so watch your fucking tone,” Richie says, his voice pleasant. 

“I’m afraid of a lot of things, Tom,” Bill says. “But you know what I’m _not_ afraid of?” He rests hand on Tom’s shoulder, conversational. Relaxed. “Fuckin’ clowns.” 

He shoves Tom in the center of the chest with one hand. Behind him, hands in his pockets, casual as if he’s waiting for a bus, Stan sticks out his foot. Tom reels in place, tipping backwards in slow motion, arms windmilling and then—falls. 

The splash is loud as a bomb in Bev’s ears, water droplets hanging suspended in the air, shining like glass. There is a beat of perfect silence, then Tom surges up with a sucking gasp. He’s halfway in the deep end, and he splashes around, spewing water with each rattling breath. When his shoes can touch the bottom, he just stands there, staring at them, dumbstruck, heaving. 

It is not impossible to be scared of someone in a pool with all their clothes on. But it’s suddenly a little harder than it was before. 

Eddie hunches down to look seriously into Tom’s eyes. “You should never run by a pool, Tom, it’s dangerous. That’s why they put up signs.”

Bev sucks air into her lungs, feels her ribs expand where they broke, then healed. She closes her hand into a fist. Like she’s ready to throw a rock. Like she’s ready to crush something to dust in her grip. 

It stole her life once. Made her forget that she was loved, that she was brave, that she had people who would have died for her, who almost did. But she reached through a lake of blood to pull Ben out of the crushing earth. She is Beverly Marsh, and she can make people believe.

_Believe this_ , she whispers to herself. _Never again._

She eases out of Ben’s warm grip, and he lets her go. She squeezes his hand tight once, quickly, before letting her fingers fall away. With every step she takes, she feels her body bloom brighter and brighter, muscle and tendon and nerve pulsing with life. Blood doesn’t scare her anymore. It just pumps through her heart, her fists, her good, strong legs. 

She looks down at Tom, still sputtering in the water, tilts her head to the side, and really sees him, maybe for the first time, exactly as he is. 

She is Beverly Marsh, and she does not miss. 

“You’re _smaller_ than I remember.”

There is a moment of perfect, glistening silence, and Bev feels _something_ she's been carrying around as long as she can remember _crack_ and start to crumble into dust—then Tom _roars_ and tries to lounge at her, but all he does is splash around. Someone clears their throat loudly across the pool. 

“Sir, I’m going to have to ask you to come with me.” Front Desk Cheryl is standing on the other side of the pool fence with a man in a sheriff’s uniform. 

“These people attacked me,” Tom shouts, spitting water droplets with every syllable. 

“He physically threatened our friend and then slipped and fell in the pool,” Stan says, his voice as calm as a business meeting. 

“Well, son, that’s why you don’t run near pools, it’s dangerous,” the sheriff says, hands on his hips. 

“That’s what I told him,” Eddie says, nodding emphatically. 

“He _hit_ me,” Tom shouts, pointing at Richie, flinging more water. 

“Officer, I will admit to bonking this man with a pool noodle when he tried to attack a hundred-pound, five-foot-two woman in a bathing suit,” Richie says, holding out his weapon. 

“Sir, are you accusing this man of striking you with a pool noodle?”

“ _No,_ I’m accusing him of striking me with his _fists_ —“

“There are many, many witnesses who can confirm that did not happen,” Stan says, voice still pleasantly bland. 

Tom just makes a wordless sort of roar and slaps the water. 

“Now, sir, I am gonna ask you again to come with me. This is private property and you do not have permission to be here.” The sheriff beckons Tom like he’s speaking to an unruly child. “I am gonna escort you off my island and if I catch you on it again, I’m throwing you in lockup, do you understand me?”

Tom just snarls and starts stalking out of the water. 

“I’m gonna need a yes or a no, sir,” the sheriff says. Cheryl glowers at Tom over a hibiscus bush. 

“ _Yes,_ ” Tom spits, and walks across the cement patio. He’s trying to be terrifying, but his shoes are squelching with each step. He slams the gate shut behind him, shooting Bev one last poisonous look, but that trick doesn’t work on her anymore. 

“Don’t you worry, honey,” Cheryl says, coming through the gate, to take Bev’s hand. “Your friend told us to keep an eye out for him in case he showed up,” she says, nodding to Stan, “and as I soon as I spotted him I called Chester. That good-for-nothin’ won’t be bothering you here again, don’t you worry.” 

Bev just looks at Stan.

“It felt like the right thing to do,” Stan shrugs, and Mike breaks into a smile. 

“Right,” Bev says. 

“You let me know if there’s anything you need, sweetie,” Cheryl says, squeezing Bev’s hand. “My daughter’s first husband that he could throw his weight around, too. Not on my watch. No _sir._ ” She pats Ben’s arm as she heads back to the office. 

They stand around in silence around the pool, its surface calm again. A seagull cries somewhere overhead. 

_“Welcome to the Losers Club, asshole!”_ Richie shouts at the sky and they all sort of collapse wherever they happen to be standing. Bev folds up like a lawn chair at the edge of the pool, head in her hands. She can’t stop fucking laughing. 

“…Okay, what did I miss?” Patty asks, standing at the gate with a drink in each hand. 

The boys can explain. Bev cannonballs in the pool. 

  
They sleep in the big bedroom, all eight of them, Bev sandwiched on the bed between Richie and Eddie, Patty sardined on Eddie’s other side. Mike has his pillow pulled up to the edge of the bed. Stan and Bill are on the other side. Ben sleeps in front of the door.

When Bev dreams, it’s of leaping from a great height. There is water very far below. Halfway down, she turns into a bird and flies. 

  
The goodbyes are hard, but not as hard as she thought they’d be. There’s no fear now. She knows she can’t lose them. 

Richie starts blowing up the group chat as soon as she and Ben walk through the airport doors, and really, it’s almost like they’re not apart at all. 

  
Ben listens to the flight attendant’s in-flight safety instructions with careful attention and then takes out his laminated airplane guide and carefully reads through it, front to back. 

“Are you afraid of flying?” She asks, keeping her voice low. She knows he has to fly all the time for his job. It must be awful for him, if he’s afraid.

“No, but I feel bad if they don’t think I’m paying attention,” he says, with big, distressed cow eyes, and she has to kiss him right on the mouth, it’s out of her hands. 

He smiles against her lips, his heads quirked in question when she pulls back. 

“You’re cute,” she says by way of explanation, and settles into her tinny airplane Bloody Mary and some stupid video game movie where she can watch the Rock punch things and soothe her into a fugue state. Ben is sipping a whiskey and sending more work emails when she starts, but by the time the credits roll and she emerges from her Rock-punch stupor, he’s watching _Finding Nemo_ and crying. Not _cry_ -crying, just his eyes welling up a bit, and she leans her head on his shoulder and he gives her an ear bud and she the next thing she’s aware of is Ben gently shaking her shoulder as people standing up around them and fetch down bags from overhead. 

“Hey,” his voice rasps in her ears. “Hey, we’re almost home.” 

  
Ben turns down a gravel road and when he pulls up in front of a long tree-lined drive, he pauses, turning to her with big, nervous eyes.

“Okay, so before you see it, I just—please understand that this is my pancake house.”

Bev has a vision of Ben building a house exclusively to eat pancakes in, like a cartoon bear, and finds it so fucking cute she’s a little disgusted with herself. 

“Your…?”

“You know when you’re making pancakes, and the first one is mostly just to figure out how to make pancakes? So it’s all weird-shaped, and burned on one side and raw on the other?”

Bev has never made pancakes in her life. 

“Sure.”

“This is my pancake house.”

Bev bites her lip to tap down her smile. 

“I was just—“ He pulls up the narrow driveway with ease of long habit. “I was trying out a lot of stuff that I couldn’t do with clients and there’s just a lot of—“ He waves a hand around. “Elements.” 

“I promise not to make fun of your pancake house.”

The house appears from behind a stand of tall, skinny pine trees, the entire front side of it what appears to be one long piece of uninterrupted glass. It’s long and low to the ground, like it’s sunning itself. 

“ _Elements,_ ” she says repeats, delighted. Ben rubs at the back of his neck and pulls up to the garage. 

She Ben designed the house itself, but she can also tell as she walks around that he hired a decorator, and probably “let them do their job” and that’s why everything here is beautiful and almost completely untouchable. There is no way anyone has made out on that slick leather sofa. You’d slide onto the ground, you’d _squeak_ every time you shifted your weight. If she was in charge of this room, the first thing she would do is reupholster that couch in something soft and breathable like cotton, velvet against bare skin can be surprisingly rough and chafing. Linen, maybe. A thick, dark linen, so you could eat while you watched TV and not want to kill your self if you dropped something. 

She stubs her toe on a comedically huge golden turtle statue that somehow managed to sneak up on her and swears.

“I gotta ask…” She says, gesturing at the turtle with one hand while she rubs her sore toes.

“People give me sculptures,” Ben says, looking upset. “I don’t know why.” 

They’re in his office, which is sort of also the living room and also the kitchen and also the dining room. She pictures Ben here, alone in this empty, open house. It’s the sort of house, she thinks, where you can see everyone else from anywhere you are. It’s a house built around the idea of guests, of how parties sprawl from room to room. You could talk to people in the living room while you cooked dinner—while you worked, even. Ben built his pancake house around the shape of them, even when he couldn’t remember why and she loves him. 

It’s a generally wall-free space, but there’s a door that leads to the other half of the house across the hall from his desk. She thinks about that day at Ben’s house in Derry, his pleading face, the thrill of a shared secret. She thinks, _I am going to get a New Kids on the Block poster and stick it behind the door and not tell him and wait til he notices._ She gets a vision of it so sharp it almost feels like an actual vision: Ben kicking the door closed behind him without looking, talking with his phone held between his ear and shoulder, one hand on his laptop, spinning in his desk chair to look for something and suddenly—his eyes huge, that flashing grin, quick as a thunderclap, a startled bark of a laugh, “No, sorry, I just dropped my phone—“

“What’re you laughing at?” Ben asks in that warm rasp of his that she wants to make clothes out of and roll around in, his eyes crinkled into a smile. 

“It’s a _secret,_ ” she says, wrapping her arms around his neck. “But I’ll tell you if you ask me nicely.” 

  
She wakes up in the night and doesn’t know where she is. It’s so dark and so quiet, she can’t hear cars, or even waves, just Ben breathing slow and heavy next to her—

Ben. She rolls over, clumsy with sleep, pajamas twisting around her, and presses herself flat against his side, shoving her cold feet between his calves. He wraps an arm around her, still asleep, and sighs when she lets her weigh settle on him. She can see the watery moonlight seeping through the window, a different direction than she’s used to. She can just make out the shapes of trees. She can imagine, just barely, how it must look in the dawn sunlight, how in a few hours it will be like they’re in a treehouse, or a clubhouse, something Ben built to keep something precious safe. 

Home. She’s home. 

**Author's Note:**

> Yes, this is IS part of the PSCU ([Puzzlestan](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25638142) Cinematic Universe) 
> 
> Idk if “Tempo” was officially released yet in 2016 and it is very important to me that you understand that I do not care. 
> 
> Bev’s line to Tom is a shoutout to Gerald’s Game and the Mike Flanagan supremacy. 
> 
> The lizard earrings thing is absolutely real, but I cannot be held responsible for what you do with hat knowledge. 
> 
> The title is from “Instead of Killing Yourself” by Derrick Brown.


End file.
